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"Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years."

"Some people assume that once quantum computing comes along modern encryption technologies will be outpowered. But experts are starting to posit that hash functions and asymmetric encryption could defend not only against modern computers, but also against quantum attackers from the future."

"The folks at Signal are taking one of the four post-quantum cryptography algorithms that have been chosen by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to withstand attacks by quantum computers, but instead of using it to replace their existing public-key encryption system, they are layering the new algorithm on top of what they already have. "We are augmenting our existing cryptosystems," they say, "such that an attacker must break both systems in order to compute the keys protecting people's communications." And they will be rolling out this augmented system to all users in the next few months."

"As dire as that sounds, panic isn't in order just yet. Researchers are already working on "quantum-resistant" encryption. Some companies claim to have made significant progress in the field. Google, among others, is working on a new form of security for its browser that might rebuff a quantum algorithm."

"Interestingly, the time reversal algorithm itself could prove useful for making quantum computers more precise. "Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors," Lebedev explained."

"Moore's Law (or the exponential growth of integrated circuits) is actually referring to the fifth paradigm of computation. Here's the list of the underlying technologies: (1) Electromechanical; (2) Vacuum Tube; (3) Relay; (4) Transistors; and (5) Integrated Circuits. Quantum computers may well be the sixth paradigm, given that they work in a fashion that is entirely different from "classical" computers"

"Google and NASA announced at an event at NASA's Ames Research Center that the D-Wave quantum computer they bought in 2013 has proven itself to be 100 million times faster than a conventional single-core computer"

"There will be more where that came from. So it's time for a reality check. Quantum computers are interesting, but experience so far suggests they are exceedingly tricky to build and even harder to scale up. There are now about 50 working machines, most of them minuscule in terms of qubits. The biggest is one of IBM's, which has - wait for it - 433 qubits, which means scaling up to 20m qubits might, er, take a while. This will lead realists to conclude that RSA encryption is safe for the time being and critics to say that it's like nuclear fusion and artificial general intelligence - always 50 years in the future."

"Google released a beta test version of its Chrome browser that attempts to keep your data secure even if today's uncrackable encryption becomes tomorrow's code-breaking cakewalk. The Chrome 54 beta gets the ability to encipher data sent to and from websites with a technology called CECPQ1. It "protects against future attacks using large quantum computers," Google said in a blog post Thursday."

"Quantum computing may offer potential benefits to the financial services industry, but it also poses risks. Banks rely on encryption to keep their transactions and customer data secure. This involves scrambling and unscrambling data using keys made of very large numbers - tens, if not hundreds, of digits long."

"The agency has invested nearly $80 million to build a computer that could break "nearly every kind of encryption," according to a Washington Post report published online Thursday. Based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the Post reports the NSA is racing to build a "cryptologically useful quantum computer" research program called "Penetrating Hard Targets.""

"…in about ten years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore's Law. In fact, already, we see a slowing down of Moore's Law. Computer power simply cannot maintain its rapid exponential rise using standard silicon technology. - Dr. Michio Kaku - 2012"

GREAT ARTICLE ON AI "There is some debate about how soon AI will reach human-level general intelligence-the median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists about when they believed we'd be more likely than not to have reached AGI was 204012-that's only 25 years from now, which doesn't sound that huge until you consider that many of the thinkers in this field think it's likely that the progression from AGI to ASI happens very quickly. Like-this could happen: It takes decades for the first AI system to reach low-level general intelligence, but it finally happens. A computer is able understand the world around it as well as a human four-year-old. Suddenly, within an hour of hitting that milestone, the system pumps out the grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, something no human has been able to definitively do. 90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human."