On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computer professionals, said Drs. Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard won this year's Turing Award for their work in quantum cryptography and other related technologies.
The Turing Award, which was established in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing and includes a $1 million prize, which will be shared by the two scientists.
The two met in 1979 while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean off the north coast of Puerto Rico. They were on a break from attending an academic conference in San Juan. Dr. Bennett swam over to Dr. Brassard and suggested that they use quantum mechanics to create a paper currency that could never be counterfeited.
Collaborating between Montreal and New York, they applied Dr. Bennett's idea to subway tokens instead of paper money. In a research paper published in 1983, they showed that quantum subway tokens could never be counterfeited, even if someone managed to steal the subway machine used to read them.
This led to quantum cryptography.
After describing their new form of encryption in a research paper published in 1984, they demonstrated the technology with an experiment five years later.
Their system, called BB84, used photons – particles of light – to create encryption keys used to lock and unlock digital data.
By the laws of quantum mechanics, a photon's behavior changes if someone looks at it. This means that if someone tries to steal the keys, they will leave a mark that proves the theft attempt – like gelatin breaking in a package.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
