"The Nobel Prize of computer science," the Turing Award, has been given to quantum researchers. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) said on the 18th (local time) that Gilles Brassard, 71, a professor at the University of Montreal in Canada, and Charles Bennett, 83, of IBM Research in the United States, were selected as Turing Award recipients for establishing the foundations of quantum information science and playing a key role in revolutionizing secure communications and computing. The two will share the $1 million prize sponsored by Google.
The Turing Award is named after Alan Turing (1912-1954), the British mathematician known as the "father of computer science," and has been awarded since 1966. Turing is the founder of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) and made a decisive contribution to cracking German codes during World War II. The test of whether a machine has intelligence equal to that of a human is also named after him, the "Turing test."
◇Quantum cryptographic communication that cannot be hacked
This is the first time the Turing Award, the most prestigious prize in computer science, has been given to researchers in quantum physics. Bennett and Brassard proposed in 1984 the concept of the first quantum cryptographic key, known as BB84. Quantum cryptographic communication uses the principles of quantum mechanics to share a secret key known only to the sender and the receiver.
Quantum cryptographic information sends data by encoding it on photons, the smallest units of light. If someone tries to hack by tampering with the photons, the signal itself turns into something meaningless. Not only is hacking impossible, attempts can be detected in real time, making security extremely high. In the late 1980s, Bennett and IBM researchers experimentally demonstrated quantum cryptographic communication technology.
The two achieved another groundbreaking result in 1993: "teleportation," made famous by the science fiction film "Star Trek." In the film, information about a person's form is sent to the destination and reconstructed. In other words, it is like dismantling a building in Busan, instantly sending its constituent materials—bricks, rebar, and so on—along with the blueprints to Seoul, and then rebuilding the original building according to the blueprints.
Strictly speaking, quantum teleportation transfers only "quantum information," the fundamental information about matter. It does not disassemble and send matter itself, as with the teleportation device in Star Trek. If, as in the film, one wanted to teleport an object from Seoul to Busan, the raw materials of the matter would first have to be prepared in Busan. One would teleport the quantum information to Busan and use that information as the blueprint to create an identical copy of the original matter from the materials in Busan.
◇Advancing into intercontinental quantum satellite communications
Their research achievements made major contributions to the development of quantum computers. Conventional computers process information as 0s and 1s depending on the presence or absence of electrons. In contrast, quantum computers can also process information in which 0 and 1 are superposed. As a result, the computational power of quantum computers is expected to increase dramatically, potentially solving in an instant computations that would take supercomputers tens of thousands of years. At present, their quantum teleportation is widely used to move critical computational information within a quantum computer or to transmit information from one quantum computer to another.
Quantum teleportation was experimentally verified by Alain Aspect, a professor at the University of Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique in France, John F. Clauser, founder of the John F. Clauser Institute in the United States, and Anton Zeilinger, a professor at the University of Vienna in Austria. The three received the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics.
Quantum teleportation has advanced into quantum satellite communications. A research team led by Pan Jian-Wei, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China and a student of Zeilinger, succeeded in 2016 in wireless quantum communication between two cities 2,600 kilometers apart using the satellite Micius (Mozi).
In 2017, Pan succeeded in intercontinental quantum communication between Xinglong, northeast of Beijing, and Graz, south of Vienna in Austria, about 7,600 kilometers apart. In 2025, using an ultralight satellite weighing only one-tenth of Micius, they succeeded in quantum communication over about 13,000 kilometers from Beijing, China, to South Africa.
The quantum technologies developed over the past 10 years are called the "second quantum revolution." The first quantum revolution was the discovery of quantum mechanics between World War I and World War II. Brassard said in the international journal Nature that, given recent developments in quantum computing, there is no doubt that powerful quantum computers will emerge before long. He also noted that, as shown by demonstrations in China, the same goes for the quantum internet.
References
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2026), https://amturing.acm.org/