On The World Health Organization he is John McGiver thing since April many I.C.R.C. Programs have stopped because it wasn't safe enough for its workers to operate in Taliban controlled areas now these are set to restart they include evacuating the wounded for medical treatment and delivering the dead to their families for burial the I.C.R.C. Succeeded in changing the Taliban's mind after a top level meetings in Doha this was the 2nd such ban within a year a reminder of how difficult and complex it is to provide aid to Afghanistan Juma giving reporting you're listening to the latest world news from the B.B.C. . Turkey says the delivery of the 2nd battery of a Russian missile defense system has been completed despite U.S. Objections the ministry of defense said the S 400 system would become active next April Washington oppose the purchase arguing the Russian weapons are not compatible with NATO defenses and pose a threat to U.S. Fighter jets. Thousands of members of the Ethiopian Orthodox churches staged protests in an Harras state saying there's been a series of recent attacks targeting churches some of which have been set on fire cocky Danny about how reports thousands of people took to the streets of the historic city of ponder as well as other. States to condemn recent attacks the protesters condemned the Egyptian government for failing to offer protection and they also want composition to rebuild the damaged church while it's really just violence is fairly rare in Ethiopia ethnic divisions are a major problem and some of the ethnic fault lies mirror the religious differences Britain's Liberal Democrat Party has promised to cancel leaving the European Union if it wins power at the next general election party members formally adopted a policy at a conference to revoke the notification sent to the E.U. That Britain will leave the block the Liberal Democrats hold just 18 of the 650 seats in parliament they need an unprecedented swing to win power however this year 6 M.P.'s from other parties who switched allegiance to them officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo say 34 people have died in a boat accident near the capital Kinshasa that more than 70 others were rescued after the vessel sank in the River Congo during the night. Dozens of firefighters are struggling to contain a blaze fanned by strong winds at the Corinthia region of Greece the wildfire is burning high on a mountain near the coast resort of track water bombers and helicopters are being used in the operation B.B.C. News. Welcome to the inquiry on the B.B.C. World Service I'm Neal result each week for expert witnesses answer one question from the news. The question was perhaps inevitable for Canada's prime minister Justin Trudeau stood before a blackboard in a university lecture hall behind him were long equations written in chalk a reporter jokingly asked if he could explain how quantum computers worked very simply normal computers work by. Going to. Mr Trudeau gamely launched in allows us to encode more information into a much smaller computer so that's what's exciting about quantum computing and. There's a reason he was prepared Mr Trudeau was there to write a $50000000.00 government check to fund theoretical and quantum research it's not just Canada investing in quantum technology the U.S. Has pledged more than a 1000000000 dollars in the coming years China has promised even more and it's not just nation states big corporations are piling into one of our expert witnesses says money is falling out of the sky. The ideas behind quantum computing are more than a century old as companies and countries rushed to turn them into a workable technology we're asking why the race to build a quantum computer. Part one embracing uncertainty. So quantum is misunderstood what I think shiny gauche is a professor of physics and computer science at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada before we even think about quantum computing we need to understand what quantum is . This was an idea that disturbed a lot of people it's pretty different. Quantum physics began to take hold in the early 20th century till then physics had been dominated by classical theories based on observations of the everyday world it held that the universe is predictable deterministic which is to say not random. All of that had to basically be set aside in order to make space for this whole new way of thinking that perhaps the universe is not as deterministic as we think it is and that there's a fundamental uncertainty in the laws of physics itself. This uncertainty is found in the behavior of the tiniest particles of matter atoms. A physicist friend of mine put it this way to understand the quantum world you have to smash your intuition about how the universe works then rebuild it one way that I try to describe it is when you look at coins so you know if you look take a coin and you have a heads and a tails right and you flip the coin you can either get a heads or a tails in that sense that's also describe it by probabilities right so there's a 50 percent chance that you get heads in a 50 percent chance that you get tails but at any given point while you're flipping the coin there's definitely always one side that's heads and one side that's tails right yeah I think we'd all agree with that now let's try to visualize this as a Quantum Point OK. The difference is that yes we still are talking about probabilities but the additional error is that we can't actually describe during the process of the flipping It's not like one side is always heads and the other side is tails there's a slew of much more uncertain identity that this coin has. A regular coin is binary either heads or tails a quantum coin is Mom binary you can't limit it to just heads or tails its identity is fluid. Scientists have a word to express this uncertain nature. Yes So we call it superposition meaning this idea of heads and tails at sort of a some combination of these 2 that's what we call a superposition super positioning is this uncertain more than one thing at once miss and the whole point is that it's so far outside of our everyday experience that it's basically impossible to have a really good visual of it in other words if you're struggling with this relax everyone is even the scientists who work on it every day but people have realized Wait maybe there's some power to uncertainty the power of uncertainty is its non-binary nature instead of being just 2 things heads or tails it could be many things shiny go says that makes quantum computers revolutionary they're not just a step up or a better version of the computers we already have because it offer it's own completely different kinds of laws of physics so it's sort of like saying well you know a car is not just another more powerful horse and carriage I mean it will do the same job which is to get to where you need to goal but you can see that it's of course not the same science or technology at all she says quantum computing is still a relatively new field of research and those wanting to build these machines need to get to grips with the delicate uncertain nature of the quantum world. Part $200.00 is saying and says hey I'm going to Mena Professor Stephanie Vainer. She runs the quantum computing center at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands she's going to explain how a quantum computer is better than a regular one. Let's start with how regular computers work. So sirrah And one other way that we represent information in a computer or in a communication so you can imagine that if you want to send me an image or a movie. How this actually works is that the movie is broken down in a serious of zeros and ones and what you actually said to me is a millions and millions of serious amounts and from this I can then reconstruct what is your movie or in which this is true of all digital things from emails to Cathy to websites even my voice right now has been turned into zeros and ones by a computer. So on a quantum computer really work with something called quantum states and unlike classical 01 or left and right they can be both 0 and one or both left and right at the same time this is because of the idea of super positioning that we heard about earlier to see the practical difference it makes imagine you're in the center of a maze and you can use a computer to find a way out on a classical computer that we use today and you would say OK let me try it going left and then you might ask Peter to check whether the exit can be found and you go to the left. And then say you don't find a X. That's then you can ask you to hey why don't you check what happens if I go right and see whether we can find the exit there. So on a quantum computer because a quantum bit can be both left and right at the same time you can in some sense explore both the left and the right direction at the SIC time. So of course it's a little bit more complicated than that but this gives some intuition about why it's possible to solve some problems faster on a quantum computer and on any possible truss like a computer right and can it do like left and right and front and back at the same time and we use it like any combination or is it just 2 things at once it can also be more things at once so let's say that in fact you knew at the crossroad and you can go left right front or back then indeed a quantum computer could also explore many many COs at the same time. Pretty cool right useful. Moving from theory to practice people in the quantum computing world often talk about what these machines could do for medicine they could help design new drugs. So one way of course you could do that is that you go into the lab and do a chemistry experiment to figure out whether this might be a promising and it but this of course is extremely time consuming and also very easily possible busy. So people are interested in instead of sort of trying it out in experiment instead of doing a simulation to determine to chemical properties a few new design. To see where that might be promising are maybe less and the classical computer could do that in principle just like a computer can any competition because. The question is just how long does it take so unequivocal it would take a say hours to compute. Whereas on a classical computer it would take us exponentially longer in fact to say the lifetime of the earth to Russia dissolution 4000000000 years yet that's a very long time we are not interested in say testing a drug design that I can only find out after I bet or if you can be off the earth as soon as. You want to know the real good shooter. So quantum computers could revolutionize drug research which would in turn revolutionize health care there's talk of a cure for dementia that alone would seem enough to prompt huge demand yet there are very few quantum computers. What's the hold up. Part 3 tricky engineering. The way I got into this field is as a kids I was a fan of Star Trek and my job plans was to be signs of his on the enterprise what I do now is very very close to some of the themes being shown in many saw 5 films professor in a free hand singer is director of the Sussex center for quantum technology in the United Kingdom he's trying to take quantum computers from science fiction to science fact quantum computer and in a way the holy grail of signs and because of the tremendous opportunities things he can calculate with such a machine but at the same time there unbelievably hard to realize and the reason why Desa difficult to build is because it is so hard to control these very strange quantum phenomena such as superposition and you need to control these very rare go in order to then be able to execute computations. He says scientists have tried to do this in a lot of different ways of the past 3 decades most have failed to physical platforms however delivered very amazing results one of the systems to superconducting circuits this is a system which is used by I.B.M. In Google attempting to build a quantum computer you say superconducting circuit does that even mean it's a particular electronic circuit but in order to make use of that you actually have to cool the micro chip old way to minus 273 degree Celsius so this is unbelievably cool very close to absolute 0 not a challenge about doing that is it is actually very hard to cool a big object to such a small temperature am I to understand you correct that the problem with the sue. Conducting circuits is basically they couldn't build a big enough fridge that's why it's and a not enough a powerful enough fridge because the cooling power of a fridge meaning like how big of a microchip can such a fridge actually cool down limits to number of cubits you can actually uses such a fridge. So indifferent hen singer and his team are trying to get around the fridge problem their method involves trapping microscopic particles called ions ions are Adams with a little bit of extra electric charge and the advantage of this method is trapped ions can be used at room temperature so this is a technology where you use microchips and he said microchips can emit electric fields and these electric fields can make individual shots at times ions levitate above this microchip Now each one of these ions becomes Now one quantum bits and you can store the information so the 001 in the chip directory of the Elektra on off each individual tchotchke atom get outta here on and you can put this information on an atom on. You Some is a casual. It's amazing every time I go in my lab and look at one atom at a time I've been working this for for many many and it still blows my mind. This technology is not coming to your phone or home anytime soon and we have multiple atoms held under Smike of chips and we know make use of these individual atoms to perform quantum computing operations of one of the machines look like they're very big there maybe one or 2 meters Swifty extra vacuum systems but then we yes some lasers involved a lot of electronics a lot of optics a lot of cable it's pumps and things like God So he looks a little bit like a syphon movie in fact there is a multiple films I've used imagery from our laboratory to reprise and versus I 5 settings which is a time machine Rizieq does look very futuristic then afraid hands and his team have now built 5 prototype quantum computers but to do any of the exciting calculations around say drug design they need a lot more cubits So they're developing ways to produce them on an industrial scale this is indeed one of the biggest challenges right now when working on quantum computation so all the quantum computers being built around the world right now only have a handful of cubits and so what we were in my lab at Sussex is actually to scale is from a few 5 a TENS of cubits to foul reasons millions or even billions of cubits he figures were 2 to 5 years out from seeing the 1st really useful calculations on quantum computers people will patch into the machines by the cloud so we are kind of right now in the 940 S. Where there are very early in the 1st computer this so there is a just a few machines and they're very big they're very expensive to have very difficult. To run bots we are under verge of achieving the possibility to already address some really important problems just like it happened in the 1940 S. Think what traditional computers did in their early days in the mine 140 S. 1st conventional computers were built and obviously a conventional computer in a 940 S. Decided 2nd world war by a bling to crack to Germany and today cryptography and codes are again at the cutting edge of computer science the hope is to harness quantum theory to gain a decisive edge in a growing geo political rivalry. Part 4 beating the. Bike built a quantum computer and now I could bring the entire Internet down in 3 days OK That's quite a claim Let's walk through that slowly again don't worry Jonathan Dowling isn't a supervillain He's been studying the potential of quantum computing for more than 3 decades 1st for the U.S. Army and now as a professor at Louisiana State University there is a race to build the 1st one a computer this is very similar to the space race it's a race to keep secrets from personal data to corporate information to the most sensitive military plans all of this information is power and countries have come to know just how exposed they are I burned my life to the ground. To work against surveillance in 2013 the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden became a fugitive and a household name after he leaked highly classified material it revealed just how far America's N.S.A. The National Security Agency and its allies had penetrated foreign communication networks they were even allegedly tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone Edward Snowden leaks. surprise the cheney that you know the and as say could read much more than a thought simile almost everything yeah and seemingly almost everything and then the 2nd one is there there are also concerned at the americans will build a quantum computer 1st and that would allow them to read everything the chinese have and stop the chinese reading american secrets to understand how this happens we need to imagine the scenario with 3 players there are always 3 players alice and bob her trying to communicate securely and eve eve e e is for the eavesdropper the person in the middle trying to steal the key or the message currently one of the most secure ways to send messages involves something called public key encryption bob once to send information alice he locks it up with the key and sense that the alice but only alice says the key to unlock the box and the security of this is dim breasts on the assumption that it would take longer than the life them of the univers for a classical computer to hack is public key however an if you had a quantum compere it could crack alice's private he within milliseconds as opposed to the lifetime of the universe is for bobbin alice the sound scary but there is a bright side quantum gives us threat and a gift his says he he of use a quantum computer i can hack all yours stuff but if you switch your staff to quantum he then and even a quantum computer can't hack you and thoughts because of super positioning if ball been alice have a quantum network think what happens when eve tries to capture their messages so it the eavesdropper tries to measure at the photons in-flight she inadvertently need their straw is the information the key that they're caring and she reveals herself did the 2 parties they know somebody is trying to eavesdrop aso observation it's self will destroy the information that's quantum mechanics the a look at in a is guy on you've collapsed the superposition this is the prize in the race to build quantum computers totally 6 Communications if you look at patents in quantum cryptography the Chinese are ahead there's an imbalance of power the Chinese as been developing a network and which will eventually include satellites where they will as stablish quantum cryptographic he's all across China either by fiber via satellite and their entire internet will now be protected by quantum cryptography which is one hackable by any means Johnson dolling is a member of the Chinese Academy of Science he spends 3 months a year working in Chinese labs he knows what they're doing I would say China will go dark within 2 to 5 years meaning that nobody including the N.S.A. And reading any of their stuff. But will be in a position that we haven't rolled out quantum cryptography in the United States so our information is still vulnerable used to work for the U.S. Army Do you still have contacts with the U.S. Government yet what are they saying when you tell them that China could go dark. My U.S. Government. Is often very tone deaf and in terms of what is going on for years and I said look the Chinese are getting ahead in these areas and I was told back we're alway