Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 08:46:38 -0800 (PST) From: "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb> To: freebsd-chat Subject: time to up your pgp keys to 4096 bits? Message-ID: <199803231646.IAA17140@hub.freebsd.org>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
saw this this morning: Monday March 23 9:42 AM EST Science nearing breakthrough in quantum computing SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory believe they are just a few years away from reaching an elusive goal in computing -- developing a working quantum computer. In remarks before the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, Los Alamos scientists described how they solved two critical questions blocking the development of these devices: how long the storage media will last, and how long it will take the computing media to complete an operation. A quantum computer is a device that replaces the zeros and ones of PC binary data with photons or ions trapped by electromagnetic fields. Because they are encased in these fields, the ions are in a coherent state for fractions of a second. The obstacle in using ions is that they may lose their coherence too quickly to be useful as a computing resource. The Los Alamos researchers have been able to apply a single laser pulse to a single ion in an electromagnetic trap. >From their demonstration, the researchers said that as many as 100,000 logic operations could be applied to registers that consist of up to 50 trapped ions. It would take but a few microseconds for a register to complete a single operation. Although it is smaller and faster than any silicon-based device, quantum computers are not expected to replace desktop PCs or supercomputers. Instead, these machines would be dedicated to specialized tasks such as generating keys for strong cryptography, an operation that requires a computer to factor very large numbers. (Reuters/Wired) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199803231646.IAA17140>