Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

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I don't want to take anything away from Bennett and Brassard, but I'd like someone to spare a word for poor Stephen Wiesner, who invented the earliest quantum information-distribution protocols as far back as the 1960s and published them before Bennett and Brassard. He also invented Oblivious Transfer (OT) which is required for multi-party computation -- although his was a quantum protocol that demonstrated some of the ideas behind QKD, not the classical protocol we call OT today [1].* Weisner was an inspiration for Bennett and Brassard, who then realized more useful systems.

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.)

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1008908.1008920

Actually you can't compose quantum crypto protocols like you can classical ones - the composed protocol needs a new security analysis. Entanglement across protocols often kills the composition!

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.

Don't forget about William Wootters, who also did significant work in the 1980s on quantum information. Most notably with Zurek, he proved the quantum no-cloning theorem in 1982. This result is at the same foundational level as energy conservation or constancy of light.

He was also on the Teleportation discovery in 1993.

Asher Peres told me that Bill Wootters should be given 99% of the credit for the teleportation discovery (and this is in the context that most of us around at the time presumed the majority of the credit should go to Peres and Wootters who had already been discussing publicly very similar stuff).

Interesting to hear, but also not surprising. His thinking was so far ahead of time.

> and I've since checked with an LLM

but did you recheck it yourself, or are you trusting unreliable narrator?

I only checked the abstracts, and they seem consistent. Good LLMs (Claude Opus, ChatGPT Pro) still get things wrong regularly, but lately I've noticed these are mainly the deep details, not easy things like "there is a result that claims X."

If you enjoy reading about undervalued scientists, check out the life of Ernst Stückelberg, who missed out on 4 to 5 Nobel prizes because he mostly published in unknown journals. https://blogg.perostborn.com/2023/03/22/hes-not-so-easily-st...

Wiesner was quite a character but he died a few years ago, so wouldn't have been eligible for this year's award.

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