Today, the Turing Award, known as the "Nobel Prize in computing", was announced.The American Computer Association (ACM) announced that it will award the 2025 Turing Award to Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard in recognition of their core contributions in creating the foundation of quantum information science and innovating secure communications and computing.
It is worth noting that this is the first time that the Turing Award has been awarded to research directly related to quantum physics since its establishment in 1966.
The Turing Award is recognized as the highest honor in computer science, with a prize of $1 million and is funded by Google.
It is understood that Bennett and Brassard are widely regarded as one of the founders of quantum information science.
In 1984, inspired by the views of their late collaborator Stephen Wisner, the two published a paper "Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing" at a signal processing conference in Bangalore, India, and proposed the BB84 protocol, which was later named after the initials of the two people's surnames.
They demonstrated that even in the face of an adversary with extremely powerful computing power, communicating parties can still use the laws of quantum mechanics to establish secure encryption keys.
The core principle is that quantum information changes once it is measured, so any eavesdropping will leave traces that can be discovered.
This idea is also considered to be one of the important technical paths in the future to deal with the possibility of quantum computers cracking traditional encryption systems.
Currently, improved versions of the BB84 protocol have been verified in multiple quantum communication networks around the world, including optical fiber quantum communication and satellite quantum communication systems.