"The Nobel Prize of computer science," the Turing Award, was given to quantum researchers. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced on the 18th (local time), "Gilles Brassard (71) of the University of Montreal in Canada and Charles Bennett (83) of IBM Research in the United States, who played a key role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and revolutionizing secure communications and computing, have been selected as winners of the Turing Award." The two will share a $1 million prize sponsored by Google (about 1.5 billion won).
The Turing Award is named after Alan Turing (1912–1954), the British mathematician known as the "father of computer science," and has been presented since 1966. Turing was a founder of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) and made a decisive contribution to breaking 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 as the "Turing test."
◇Unhackable quantum encrypted communications
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 in 1984 proposed the first concept of a quantum cryptographic key, known as BB84. Quantum encrypted communication uses principles of quantum mechanics to share a secret key known only to two parties, the sender and the receiver.
Quantum encrypted information transmits data by encoding it onto photons, the smallest units of light. If someone tries to hack and interferes with the photons, the signal itself turns into something meaningless. Not only is hacking impossible, but attempts can be detected in real time, making security extremely high. In the late 1980s, Bennett and an IBM research team experimentally demonstrated quantum encrypted communication technology.
The two achieved another groundbreaking result in 1993: "teleportation," made famous by the science fiction movie "Star Trek." In the film, information about a person's form is sent to a destination and reconstructed. In other words, it is like dismantling a building in Busan and then instantaneously sending its constituent materials—bricks, rebar, and so on—along with the blueprints to Seoul, and reconstructing the original building according to the blueprints.
Strictly speaking, quantum teleportation transmits only "quantum information," the fundamental information about matter. It does not dismantle and send the matter itself like the teleportation device in Star Trek. If, as in the movie, you were to quantum-teleport an object from Seoul to Busan, the materials of the matter would first need to be prepared in Busan. You would remotely transmit the quantum information to Busan and, using that information as a blueprint, create an identical copy of the original matter from the materials in Busan.
◇Advancing to intercontinental quantum satellite communications
Their research results greatly contributed to the development of quantum computers. Conventional computers process information by dividing it into 0s and 1s depending on whether an electron is present. 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 grow dramatically, enabling them to solve in an instant calculations that would take a supercomputer tens of thousands of years. Today, 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 demonstrated by Alain Aspec, a professor at Paris-Saclay University 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 Jianwei, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China and a student of Zeilinger, succeeded in wireless quantum communication between two cities 2,600 km apart in 2016 using the satellite Micius (墨子).
In 2017, Pan Jianwei succeeded in intercontinental quantum communication between Xinglong, northeast of Beijing, and Graz, south of Vienna, Austria, about 7,600 km apart. In 2025, using an ultra-small satellite weighing only one-tenth that of Micius, they succeeded in quantum communication over a distance of about 13,000 km from Beijing, China, to South Africa.
Quantum technology developed over the past 10 years is 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 the same day in the international journal Nature that, given recent developments in quantum computing, there is no doubt that powerful quantum computers will emerge soon. In particular, he said that, as seen in China's demonstrations, the same holds true for the quantum internet.
References
ACM (2026), https://amturing.acm.org/