While obviously this takes nothing away from BB's many later contributions (and they have extensively credited him), it's just a reminder of the randomness that goes with scientific credit. Since my PhD thesis was on OT, I like to remind people of Wiesner. He deserves a lot more credit than he gets!
* I suppose if you're a real theoretician, since OT implies MPC and MPC implies all cryptography, then perhaps Wiesner's OT implies everything that BB did subsequently. I'm not sure any of that is true (and I've since checked with an LLM and there are some no-go theorems from the 1990s that block it, so that's super interesting.)
Interestingly (to me!) it took a while in the 90’s/early 00’s for the community to realise that there are distinct questions:
Question A: Does there exist a set of target states and measurements that implement the task
Question B: Can mistrustful parties find a communication protocol that securely (from their perspective) create/implement those states/measurments.
An example where the answer to A is “no” is fully secure oblivious transfer. There were a bunch of misguided papers trying to find communication protocols for OT, but they were doomed from the start!
An example where the answer to A is “yes" but to B is “no” is strong coin flipping. And an example where the answer to both is “yes” is weak coin flipping. (See Carlos Mochon’s magnus opus arxiv 0711.4114 for the coin flipping examples).
I first articulated the distinction between A and B quant-ph/0202143 but left the proof about OT and Question A as an exercise to the reader! Roger Colbeck in arxiv 0708.2843 provided a simple proof and elucidated the whole situation a lot I think.
He was also on the Teleportation discovery in 1993.
but did you recheck it yourself, or are you trusting unreliable narrator?
I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer runs all possible paths in parallel.
Relevant concerning your point:
> "The Talk"
I need a longer think on the interference/computation connection though
...and Shor's Algorithm
ACM has named Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard as the recipients of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing.
* An accessible news excerpt via CNN science [1]
Years before emails, internet banking, cloud servers and cryptocurrency wallets, two scientists devised a way to keep secrets perfectly safe and indecipherable to eavesdropping outsiders.
Their 1984 work depended on the hidden, counterintuitive world of quantum physics, which governs the way the world works at the smallest, subatomic scale, rather than complex but theoretically breakable mathematical codes to secure data.
The insights of Charles Bennett, an American physicist who is a fellow at IBM Research, and Gilles Brassard, a Canadian computer scientist and professor at the University of Montreal, have since transformed cryptography and computing. The pair received the A.M. Turing Award on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work on quantum key cryptography.
[0] https://www.acm.org/media-center/2026/march/turing-award-202...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/18/science/quantum-key-crypt...
This is mentioned almost as a footnote, but to (layman) me seems much more important than QKD, especially from a comp sci perspective instead of a physics perspective.
The quantum computers are not quite large enough to search at an `n` such that O(n)` is not viable but `O(sqrt(n))` is, that's where there's money to be made, especially if viability is defined by small time horizons. So it's a footnote for the future.
It can, but it isn't largely because the classical solutions solve the problem better and you usually have to resort to classical solutions to solve MITM anyways afaik. However my point is less about practicality and more QKD seems more like a physics or engineering thing and not a computer science thing.
After all, this is supposed to be a computer science prize not a make money prize, so which is more sellable should be besides the point.
There is some interesting work being done, but it will never match the excessive hype. =3
"The Genius of Computing with Light"
Time will tell.
As Sabine Hossenfelder (Theoretical Physicist) points out, companies to do with QC are seeing a surge in investments and marketing. It is as if somebody knows something that the "common public" doesn't - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBTS7JZTyZY
I don't know enough about the science/technology to form an opinion but have recently started down the path of trying to understand it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599807
oooorrr - and hear me out - investments are inherently hype-based and irrational and there is too much money flying around to do actual smart decisions
I did see Gilles' lunch talks though, it was really insightful!
Congratulations to Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard.
