Ben Brubaker – Quanta Magazine

Computer Scientists Prove That Heat Destroys Quantum Entanglement

Ben Brubaker — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 14:09:05 +0000

Nearly a century ago, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called attention to a quirk of the quantum world that has fascinated and vexed researchers ever since. When quantum particles such as atoms interact, they shed their individual identities in favor of a collective state that’s greater, and weirder, than the sum of its parts. This phenomenon is called entanglement. Researchers have a firm...

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With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits

Ben Brubaker — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time, over 40 years ago, a horde of computer scientists descended on the West German city of Dortmund. They were competing to catch an elusive quarry — only four of its kind had ever been captured. Over 100 competitors dragged in the strangest creatures they could find, but they still fell short. The fifth busy beaver had escaped their clutches. Of course, that slippery beast and its...

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Cryptographers Discover a New Foundation for Quantum Secrecy

Ben Brubaker — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 15:45:06 +0000

Say you want to send a private message, cast a secret vote or sign a document securely. If you do any of these tasks on a computer, you’re relying on encryption to keep your data safe. That encryption needs to withstand attacks from codebreakers with their own computers, so modern encryption methods rely on assumptions about what mathematical problems are hard for computers to solve.

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Cryptography Tricks Make a Hard Problem a Little Easier

Ben Brubaker — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:56:12 +0000

What’s the best way to solve hard problems? That’s the question at the heart of a subfield of computer science called computational complexity theory. It’s a hard question to answer, but flip it around and it becomes easier. The worst approach is almost always trial and error, which involves plugging in possible solutions until one works. But for some problems, it seems there simply are no...

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The Researcher Who Explores Computation by Conjuring New Worlds

Ben Brubaker — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:48:36 +0000

Imagine you’re on a quest to understand the very nature of computation. You’re deep in the wilderness, far from any paths, and inscrutable messages are carved into the trunks of trees all around you — BPP, AC0, Σ2P, YACC, and hundreds of others. The glyphs are trying to tell you something, but where to begin? You can’t even keep them all straight. Few researchers have done as much as Russell...

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