The Quantum Bogeyman

This is a syndicated version of my weekly e-mail round-up of news about Quantum Computing. Visit the homepage to subscribe to updates and check out previous issues.

👋 Hello and happy Tuesday to you!

This will be the final issue for 2018 as I’ll be trying to disconnect a bit these next two weeks and enjoy some time with the family. To compensate for this, I’ve included a double dose of news coverage to hold you over. Interestingly, it seems that safety and security implications of quantum computing are particularly buzz-worthy recently. US intelligence agencies have even gone so far as to list quantum computing as an “emerging threat” to national security! (full details in the news section below)

Looking for a particular area of quantum computing you’d like to see covered in the next issue? Ping me and let me know!

Tiny Fact of the week

We talked about Shor’s algorithm last week, and this week we’ll look at another algorithm which is perhaps just as famous: Grover’s algorithm:

Classically, searching an unsorted database requires a linear search, which is O(N) in time. Grover’s algorithm, which takes O(N1/2) time, is the fastest possible quantum algorithm for searching an unsorted database. It provides “only” a quadratic speedup, unlike other quantum algorithms, which can provide exponential speedup over their classical counterparts. However, even quadratic speedup is considerable when N is large. (