Page 51 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2023

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In response, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has worked to support
a new version of the National Quantum Initiative Act: H.R.6227. This act, first introduced in 2018, defines
the creation of an office to advise lawmakers on critical congressional committees on the impact that
quantum computing will have on the United States’ economic, political, and military interests.

In the five years since H.R.6227 was introduced, shifts in computing such as the rise of AI in LLMs such
as OpenAI’s GPT-4 have already heralded economic innovation and disruption. The arrival of stable,
powerful quantum computing will be orders of magnitude more disruptive. And it is vital that lawmakers
understand the risks, and benefits, that this landmark technology will bring.

What is Quantum Computing?

Quantum Computing (or QC) is a technology that leverages properties of quantum mechanics to
dramatically improve a computer’s ability to solve specific types of problems. Like their traditional digital
computing counterpart, QC allows for the creation of machines that can investigate and solve problems
through logic. But in certain circumstances, QCs can solve problems that would be impossibly difficult for
digital computers to solve — so much so that the universe would likely end before a result was found.

In digital computers, electrons move through circuits of gates that instrument logic and programming to
compute a result known as a bit. Bits hold two states — either “on” or “off” — that reflect the result of
computation. In QC, quantum mechanical processes are used to create quantum logic gates that operate
on subatomic particles. The output of these quantum logic gates are qubits — the quantum version of a
bit.

Unlike bits, qubits can hold multiple states at once thanks to superposition. Superposition is a principle
of quantum mechanics that allows for some interactions to hold multiple states at once. Much like
pressing some piano keys results in a sound that is a composition of multiple simultaneous notes, qubits
can utilize superposition to hold more fundamental states than their digital counterparts.

If computation is modifying a deck of playing cards and drawing a result, digital computers return a single
card. Quantum computers instead return a distribution of the probabilities of drawing every possible card
in that deck. Programmers can then use statistics to compute some results infinitely faster than they could
with a digital computer. Rather than drawing cards from a deck until you hit the Ace of Spades, a
programmer can instantly compute when you would be most likely to draw that ace without touching the
deck.

But there are drawbacks to quantum computing. The properties that make quantum computers so good
at solving some problems also make them extremely difficult to develop and reliably use. While quantum
computers already exist and are providing real value (for example: serving as infinite random number
generators) they are comparatively slower than digital computers for most interactions and not powerful
enough today to compute some of the novel solutions that enable world-changing disruption.

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