For one thing, speed. As they say in the article, “Google’s quantum processor was able to perform a calculation in three minutes and 20 seconds that would take today’s most advanced supercomputer, known as Summit, around 10,000 years.” This is great if you’re searching for new drugs to fight disease, but not so great if you are trying to encrypt sensitive communication between our governmental agencies, since it is not the case that our current encryption schemes are truly “unbreakable.” Instead, they just take a very, very, long time to break, thousands of years, or more, even with our fastest computers. Now, along comes somebody with a quantum computer who can do it in minutes. Oops, back to the drawing board!
So, Google has the “Black Box” Code Breaker tool
from the movie “Sneakers”. All the movie missed
was that it would be a quantum computing device.
Too Many Secrets, indeed.
What could go wrong...
May have gone very wrong already.