Hacker News

The IBM scientist who rewrote the rules of information just won a Turing Award

100 points by rbanffy 14 hours ago | 8 comments

Information theory gets credited to Shannon but the people who made it actually work in practice rarely get this kind of recognition. Long overdue.

fsckboy 9 hours ago

this isn't about making quantum computing work in practice, this work was still theoretical math

12_throw_away 2 hours ago

At least the first two paragraphs of this are directly plagiarized from the first source they cite [1].

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-cryptography-pioneers...

ZebusJesus 7 hours ago

To think quantum computers at IBM in the 80's, its sad to think companies like IBM and Bell Labs are not the same companies they used to be, I mean the people working at those companies during the 20th century changed the world. Im glad they got this award as it is apparent they had a huge impact on security and quantum computing in general.

wil421 5 hours ago

Serving Ads is more lucrative. I wonder what kind of stories we will tell about how the social media companies exploited human nature to make a buck.

jungturk 2 hours ago

"Serving ads" is just the commercial application. All of the infrastructure used to harness (coordinate? co-opt?) the attention of the many and direct it toward some desired aims will surely end up being a tremendously transformative social capability.

Hard to see the upside for humanity as we've understood it to date, but its definitely going to be more impactful than just making a buck.

rozal 3 hours ago

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AtlasBarfed 12 hours ago

So the guy that came up with the idea and approach is the secondary on the award?

smokel 11 hours ago

No, there is one award each year, and this year it is shared equally between two people: Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard. This happens more often, and it has even been shared between three people (in 2002, 2007 and 2018).

faxanalysis 5 hours ago

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varispeed 9 hours ago

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