The Birth of Quantum Computing

The history of Quantum Computing and Quantum Cryptography starts with a friendship between Charles Bennett and Stephen Wiesner, two undergraduates at Brandeis University who toyed with ideas for sending information using quantum entanglement, and John Conway's Game of Life, which stimulated interest in cellular automata at MIT in the 1970s and started a generation of computer scientists wondering if the universe might be some massive computer running a simulation of reality. In 1974 MIT professor Ed Fredkin spent his yearlong sabbatical at Caltech, where he learned quantum physics from Richard Feynman while he taught Feynman about computer science. Returning to MIT, Fredkin's ideas developed into the philosophy of digital physics, which blossomed into the 1981 Conference on Physics and Computation at MIT. Feynman's keynote at the conference described how a computer based on quantum mechanics principles could compute physics simulations much faster than today's classical compu