I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer runs all possible paths in parallel.

ACM has named Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard as the recipients of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing.

* An accessible news excerpt via CNN science [1]

Years before emails, internet banking, cloud servers and cryptocurrency wallets, two scientists devised a way to keep secrets perfectly safe and indecipherable to eavesdropping outsiders.

Their 1984 work depended on the hidden, counterintuitive world of quantum physics, which governs the way the world works at the smallest, subatomic scale, rather than complex but theoretically breakable mathematical codes to secure data.

The insights of Charles Bennett, an American physicist who is a fellow at IBM Research, and Gilles Brassard, a Canadian computer scientist and professor at the University of Montreal, have since transformed cryptography and computing. The pair received the A.M. Turing Award on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work on quantum key cryptography.

[0] https://www.acm.org/media-center/2026/march/turing-award-202...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/18/science/quantum-key-crypt...

This is mentioned almost as a footnote, but to (layman) me seems much more important than QKD, especially from a comp sci perspective instead of a physics perspective.

I did see Gilles' lunch talks though, it was really insightful!

Congratulations to Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard.