Comments by "" (@DanielSMatthews) on "Quantum technology will unlock 'smarter, more accurate and faster computers'" video.

  1. Quantum computers are way over sold and I know enough about information technology, and education to prove it in a way that a layperson can understand and remember. 1. one of the oldest and simplest encryption systems can never be broken by any computer of any kind and that is a simple bitwise XOR operation using a shared secret, a block of random data bits. This is the digital equivalent of the old single use pad where the spy would have a pad with random letters on it that the receiver would also have so you just have to send a reference to the position of a character within that pad and the other person can work out what the letter was, but nobody else can. So how do you move around random pads? On stripped down data chips that are small enough to hide anywhere, including inside a tooth. 2. There are some very simple problems that no computer can speed up, they are a bit harder to explain but work with a set of simple character rewrite rules. If the character is A then make it C, If B then make it D, if C make it B, if D make it A, that sort of thing. When fed a string of characters and the output is fed back into the rules over and over you eventually get to one of several outcomes, a fixed pattern, a repeating sequence or you run out of time and seem to have a random number generator that runs forever, but you can never be sure. It is this last simple question that not even quantum computers can solve, does a particular set of rules for a given input string ever stop generating new patterns? Don't believe the hype! Any questions?
    2