The Cryptographer Who Ensures We Can Trust Our Computers

published on 2023/07/31

Quantum computers, if they actually come to exist on a large scale, will be much more powerful than classical computers. Classical computers work in bits, which are either 0 or 1. In quantum computers, you have quantum bits, which are in superposition between 0 and 1. And these qubits are entangled, which means that they influence each other. That’s what really gives quantum computers their power.

In the future, it may not be that everyone has a quantum desktop. There might be a few expensive quantum devices that do remote computations for you. Suppose you want to delegate an expensive computation to one of these quantum devices, and you need some certificate that verifies the output is correct — how do you certify the correctness of quantum computers? Now that we want to use quantum bits and not classical bits, everything changes, especially when I want the verifier to be a classical computer.

Quanta Magazine