[HN Gopher] 2025 Turing award given for quantum information science
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2025 Turing award given for quantum information science
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/03/bennett-and...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-cryptography-pioneers...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/technology/turing-award-w...
https://www.wired.com/story/a-quantum-leap-for-the-turing-aw...
Author : srvmshr
Score : 80 points
Date : 2026-03-18 10:10 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (awards.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (awards.acm.org)
| srvmshr wrote:
| * From the announcement [0]:
|
| ACM has named Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard as the
| recipients of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their essential
| role in establishing the foundations of quantum information
| science and transforming secure communication and computing.
|
| * An accessible news excerpt via CNN science [1]
|
| _Years before emails, internet banking, cloud servers and
| cryptocurrency wallets, two scientists devised a way to keep
| secrets perfectly safe and indecipherable to eavesdropping
| outsiders.
|
| Their 1984 work depended on the hidden, counterintuitive world of
| quantum physics, which governs the way the world works at the
| smallest, subatomic scale, rather than complex but theoretically
| breakable mathematical codes to secure data.
|
| The insights of Charles Bennett, an American physicist who is a
| fellow at IBM Research, and Gilles Brassard, a Canadian computer
| scientist and professor at the University of Montreal, have since
| transformed cryptography and computing. The pair received the
| A.M. Turing Award on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work on
| quantum key cryptography._
|
| [0] https://www.acm.org/media-center/2026/march/turing-
| award-202...
|
| [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/18/science/quantum-key-
| crypt...
| rvz wrote:
| Well deserved and much needed recognition in quantum key
| cryptography, for once not a single mention of "AI" anywhere.
|
| Congratulations to Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| Really curious, not a critique: apart from the idea of the
| possibility of intrusion detection due to the quantum nature of
| the communication link, what is special about the protocol that
| is mentioned?
| bawolff wrote:
| > Bennett and Brassard, with Ethan Bernstein and Umesh Vazirani,
| showed that in black-box setting, quantum computers would require
| big-omega(sqrt(n)) queries to search n entries, matching Grover's
| algorithm. For some reason, the popular press rarely covers these
| results that limit the power of quantum computing.
|
| This is mentioned almost as a footnote, but to (layman) me seems
| much more important than QKD, especially from a comp sci
| perspective instead of a physics perspective.
| shemnon42 wrote:
| QKD can be sold today.
|
| The quantum computers are not quite large enough to search at
| an `n` such that O(n)` is not viable but `O(sqrt(n))` is,
| that's where there's money to be made, especially if viability
| is defined by small time horizons. So it's a footnote for the
| future.
| bawolff wrote:
| > QKD can be sold today.
|
| It can, but it isn't largely because the classical solutions
| solve the problem better and you usually have to resort to
| classical solutions to solve MITM anyways afaik. However my
| point is less about practicality and more QKD seems more like
| a physics or engineering thing and not a computer science
| thing.
|
| After all, this is supposed to be a computer science prize
| not a make money prize, so which is more sellable should be
| besides the point.
| shorden wrote:
| Worth noting that this is a bound on arbitrary search, but
| there exist some problems with structure (e.g. integer
| factorization) for which quantum algorithms are exponentially
| faster than known classical algorithms (a problem believed to
| be in NP and BQP but not P).
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| The math might be beautiful, but I'm very skeptical - practical -
| quantum computers will ever deliver their promise.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Forever is a long time, but I agree people that assert reality
| is the model are almost always incorrect eventually.
|
| There is some interesting work being done, but it will never
| match the excessive hype. =3
|
| "The Genius of Computing with Light"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbxcd9gaims
| spot5010 wrote:
| As a young grad student, I remember going to a talk by Bennett
| where he explained how a Quantum Computer allows manipulation in
| a 2^N dimensional hilbert space, while the outputs measurements
| give you only N bits of information. The trick is to somehow
| encode the result in the final N bits.
|
| I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a
| quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer runs
| all possible paths in parallel.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a
| quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer
| runs all possible paths in parallel.
|
| Relevant concerning your point:
|
| > "The Talk"
|
| > https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
| dogtimeimmortal wrote:
| Thanks for this! I guess i need to read up on Hilbert Space.
|
| ...and Shor's Algorithm
| amemi wrote:
| Don't let the terminology intimidate you. The interesting
| ideas in quantum computing are far more dependent upon a
| foundation in linear algebra rather than a foundation in
| mathematical analysis.
|
| When I started out, I was under the assumption that I had
| to understand at least the undergraduate real analysis
| curriculum before I could grasp quantum algorithms. In
| reality, for the main QC algorithms you see discussed, you
| don't need to understand completeness; you can just treat a
| Hilbert space as a finite-dimensional vector space with a
| complex inner product.
|
| For those unfamiliar with said concepts from linear
| algebra, there is a playlist [1] often recommended here
| which discusses them thoroughly.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3Mi
| zzM2x...
| RRRA wrote:
| That's 2 Turing award for the Universite de Montreal in 6 years.
| Sadly, I never had those 2 teachers during my years there!
|
| I did see Gilles' lunch talks though, it was really insightful!
| kleiba wrote:
| Coincidentally, the same people also recently received the
| Science Fiction Award 2025!
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Source?
| layer8 wrote:
| I suspect the parent considers quantum computing science
| fiction.
| 314crypto58 wrote:
| old article but still relevant. some things don't change
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I don't want to take anything away from Bennett and Brassard, but
| I'd like someone to spare a word for poor Stephen Wiesner, who
| invented the earliest quantum information-distribution protocols
| as far back as the 1960s and published them before Bennett and
| Brassard. He also invented Oblivious Transfer (OT) which is
| required for multi-party computation -- although his was a
| quantum protocol that demonstrated some of the ideas behind QKD,
| not the classical protocol we call OT today [1].* Weisner was an
| inspiration for Bennett and Brassard, who then realized more
| useful systems.
|
| While obviously this takes nothing away from BB's many later
| contributions (and they have extensively credited him), it's just
| a reminder of the randomness that goes with scientific credit.
| Since my PhD thesis was on OT, I like to remind people of
| Wiesner. He deserves a lot more credit than he gets!
|
| * I suppose if you're a real theoretician, since OT implies MPC
| and MPC implies all cryptography, then perhaps Wiesner's OT
| implies everything that BB did subsequently. I'm not sure any of
| that is true (and I've since checked with an LLM and there are
| some no-go theorems from the 1990s that block it, so that's super
| interesting.)
|
| [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1008908.1008920
| lkm0 wrote:
| If you enjoy reading about undervalued scientists, check out
| the life of Ernst Stuckelberg, who missed out on 4 to 5 Nobel
| prizes because he mostly published in unknown journals.
| https://blogg.perostborn.com/2023/03/22/hes-not-so-easily-st...
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