Researchers report that they have designed and built a quantum computer from five atoms in an ion trap. The computer uses laser pulses to carry out Shor's algorithm on each atom, to correctly factor ...

A quantum computer is a machine designed to use quantum mechanics to do things which cannot be done by any machine based only on the laws of classical physics. Eventual applications of quantum ...

One of the most well-established and disruptive uses for a future quantum computer is the ability to crack encryption. A new algorithm could significantly lower the barrier to achieving this. Despite ...

The phenomenal success of our integrated circuits managed to obscure an awkward fact: they’re not always the best way to solve problems. The features of modern computers—binary operations, separated ...

Quantum computers promise to speed calculations dramatically in some key areas such as computational chemistry and high-speed networking. But they're so different from today's computers that ...

One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the world’s secrets. Your secrets. Cybersecurity ...

For decades, the graph isomorphism problem has held a special status within complexity theory. While thousands of other computational problems have meekly succumbed to categorization as either hard or ...

An artificial intelligence created by the firm DeepMind has discovered a new way to multiply numbers, the first such advance in over 50 years. The find could boost some computation speeds by up to 20 ...

Generating a string of random numbers is easy. The hard part is proving that they’re random. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams once pointed out, “that’s the problem with randomness: you can never be sure ...