New Trends in Quantum Computing

Classical and quantum information are very different. Together they can perform feats that neither could achieve alone, such as quantum computing, quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation. Some of the applications range from helping to preventing spies from reading private communications. Among the tools that will facilitate their implementation, we note quantum purification and quantum error correction. Although some of these ideas are still beyond the grasp of current technology, quantum cryptography has been implemented and the prospects are encouraging for small-scale prototypes of quantum computation devices before the end of the millennium.Comment: 8 pages. Presented at the 13th Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, Grenoble, 22 February 1996. Will appear in the proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag. Standard LaTeX. Requires llncs.sty (included

Brief History of Quantum Cryptography: A Personal Perspective

Quantum cryptography is the only approach to privacy ever proposed that allows two parties (who do not share a long secret key ahead of time) to communicate with provably perfect secrecy under the nose of an eavesdropper endowed with unlimited computational power and whose technology is limited by nothing but the fundamental laws of nature. This essay provides a personal historical perspective on the field. For the sake of liveliness, the style is purposely that of a spontaneous after-dinner speech.Comment: 14 pages, no figure

On The Power of Exact Quantum Polynomial Time

We investigate the power of quantum computers when they are required to return an answer that is guaranteed correct after a time that is upper-bounded by a polynomial in the worst case. In an oracle setting, it is shown that such machines can solve problems that would take exponential time on any classical bounded-error probabilistic computer.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX2e, no figure

An Exact Quantum Polynomial-Time Algorithm for Simon's Problem

We investigate the power of quantum computers when they are required to return an answer that is guaranteed to be correct after a time that is upper-bounded by a polynomial in the worst case. We show that a natural generalization of Simon's problem can be solved in this way, whereas previous algorithms required quantum polynomial time in the expected sense only, without upper bounds on the worst-case running time. This is achieved by generalizing both Simon's and Grover's algorithms and combining them in a novel way. It follows that there is a decision problem that can be solved in exact quantum polynomial time, which would require expected exponential time on any classical bounded-error probabilistic computer if the data is supplied as a black box.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX2e, no figures. To appear in Proceedings of the Fifth Israeli Symposium on Theory of Computing and Systems (ISTCS'97