Equinox Graphics

Clusters of entangled qubits, shown in this artistic visualization, could allow remote quantum computing to be performed on a server while keeping the contents and results hidden from the remote server.

If the future is heading toward "cloud computing," where most of your data lives on someone else's server, can you trust the cloud to keep a secret? Researchers say they've found a way to guarantee that your information will be secure in the cloud, using quantum entanglement.

The technique is called blind quantum computing, and it adds one more piece to a puzzle that could eventually be assembled into an entirely new infrastructure for data processing. Theoretically, quantum computers could outdo classical computers when it comes to making weather predictions, simulating biological processes, analyzing chemical reactions and, not incidentally, deciphering secret codes. Data security could become an even bigger issue than it is today.

Whom do you trust?
Today, most of your computing power probably resides on the device you're using, whether it's a desktop or a smartphone. If you send secure data someplace else, those bits are probably encrypted using classical mathematical techniques. They're tough codes to break, but they're not unbreakable. In fact, computer scientists say quantum computers might be well-suited for cracking today's classical codes.

At the same time, there's a trend toward developing devices that shift more of the computing power onto big servers. You would still use your tablet or smartphone or netbook for input and output, but the information is stored and processed as part of a huge cloud of bits on the server. That's the idea behind the much-debated cloud computing approach.

How sure can you be that the folks who manage the cloud won't meddle with your data? And could a malicious cloud client meddle with the central server? Such questions are tricky now, and they could get trickier if quantum computing takes hold, according to an international research team led by Stefanie Barz of the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology at the University of Vienna and the Austria-based Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information.

In this week's issue of the journal Science, Barz and her colleagues note that quantum computers will be so complex that there may be only a few of them in operation at specialized facilities around the world.

"A key challenge in using such central quantum computers is enabling a quantum computation on a remote server while keeping the client's data hidden from the server," they write.

Demonstrating blind computing
The researchers worked out a system to entangle photons of light that were generated by a nonlinear crystal, and then "process" those entangled photons on an experimental setup of beam splitters, filters and couplers. The photons served as quantum bits, or qubits, to be manipulated in two types of quantum calculations (Deutsch's algorithm and Grover's search).

In this scenario, the person who provided the qubits knows their initial entangled state, and can thus decipher the entangled outcome. But the company that does the data processing wouldn't know how the qubits were entangled — and thus could not even try to decode the qubits without essentially destroying them. As far as it's concerned, all those qubits look like a totally random hodgepodge. What's more, the system has a built-in verification scheme.

"By inspecting the output, you can know if the company really has a quantum computer, without disclosing your algorithm, the input, or indeed the output," the University of Oxford's Vlatko Vedral said in a Science commentary on the research. "The computation is thus 'doubly' blind."

Barz and her colleagues say there are still some technical challenges to be overcome. for example, it's theoretically possible for some of the photons emitted while preparing the qubits to reveal information about the "blind" phase of the calculation. Also, it's important to have a high-fidelity, low-signal-loss system for processing the qubits — whether they consist of photons with different polarizations, or electrons with different spins. But however the quantum computing puzzle is put together, the researchers say their experiments will have contributed a key piece.

"Our demonstration is crucial for unconditionally secure quantum cloud computing," they say, "and might become a key ingredient for real-life applications, especially when considering the challenges of making powerful quantum computers widely available."

More perspectives on the research:

• EurekAlert: Quantum physics enables secure cloud computing
• New Scientist: Quantum computer is blind to its own bits
• BBC: Quantum computing could head to 'the cloud'
• PopSci: Quantum computing will allow secure calculation

More about quantum computing:

• A quantum leap in computing
• Tales from the quantum frontier
• Spooky quantum entanglement disturbed
• Four-atom-wide wire may herald tiny computers

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

When you look back at the past 50 years of human spaceflight, don't forget the computer scientists who helped make it all possible.

That's the message Arthur Cohen wants to pass along on the golden anniversary of NASA astronaut Alan Shepard's 1961 Freedom 7 spaceflight, a 15-minute suborbital outing that marked one not-so-small step on the way to the moon. The successful flights made by Shepard and other members of the Mercury 7 depended on the work done by Cohen and thousands of other workers behind the scenes.

"There was a lot of attention given to the seven astronauts," Cohen recalled in an interview this week. "The thing that was hardly mentioned was the fact that there were computers that were doing the work."

Today, Cohen is an adjunct professor of mathematics at Nassau Community College in New York, but back in the early 1960s he was manager for the IBM Space Computer Center in Washington, where he directed the development of all computing support for Project Mercury. Two IBM 7090 computer systems at NASA's nearby Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, plus a backup IBM 709 computer in the Bahamas, provided all the raw number-crunching power to plot the trajectories of those early spacecraft. Western Electric and Bell Labs provided the supporting communication network.

"In those days, 1,000 bits per second was high speed," the 83-year-old Cohen told me.

The data streaming down from space was funneled through Goddard and then onward to Cape Canaveral, where mission controllers kept watch on the real-time channel. "All the displays at the Cape were actually provided by us," Cohen said. Somewhere around 75 to 100 people were on IBM's team to make sure the computers were in sync.

A picture from the old days shows Cohen and members of his team gathered around the computer center, with Mercury astronauts Deke Slayton and Gus Grissom in their midst. "We did wear white shirts — that's the way IBM was back then, right? — but maybe our sleeves were rolled up," Cohen joked.

IBM

The IBM computer team mixes it up with Mercury astronauts Gus Grissom (fifth from the right) and Deke Slayton (second from the right). Arthur Cohen is fourth from the left.

After Project Mercury, Cohen turned to other, more down-to-Earth projects at IBM in New York, and retired from the company in 1988. But he says the spaceflight experience set the tone for his career and those of a whole generation of engineers. "The people who worked on the project did go on to Gemini and Apollo, and some of the people went on to the airline reservation system. One of my guys went on to the air traffic control system and managed that.," he said. "There was a lot of fallout from this stuff."

IBM

Arthur Cohen is now an adjunct professor of mathematics at Nassau Community College.

Today, almost everything about spaceflight and its computing requirements is different.

"Things have improved, but it's basically the same kind of stuff. You still have to check data, edit data, smooth data," he said. "You're still driving displays. But I think the space game is going to be much more about understanding something about deep space. It'll be a different challenge. Here, you're talking about doing an orbit in 88 minutes. There, you may be talking about years [of orbital calculations], so things may be going somewhat slower in terms of feedback about what's happening."

Despite all those diferences, Cohen suspects that the level of dedication among computer scientists will be as high as ever.

"The future for them can't be any brighter," he said. "Computers are going to be behind everything that can help mankind, whether it be medicine, or crop yields, or space. Whatever it might be, computers are going to be important. Who knows what we need to do?"

To learn more about Cohen and the contributions made by Project Mercury's "unsung computers," check out IBM's news release and this report from the DVICE blog. Do you have some behind-the-scenes stories about the past 50 years of spaceflight? If so, feel free to share your tales in the comment section below.

More on spaceflight history:

• Timeline: Glory Days on the Final Frontier
• Slideshow: Remembering Alan Shepard
• NASA celebrates 50 years of Americans in space
• Historic Mercury launch pad reimagined as classroom

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

IBM via AFP - Getty Images

IBM's Watson computer is made up of a cluster of 90 servers with a total of 2,880 processor cores.

IBM's Watson supercomputer looks like the clear favorite to win this week's man-vs.-machine match on the "Jeopardy" TV game show in the wake of today's action. Right now, the score totals are $35,734 for Watson, vs. $10,400 and $4,800 for the game's two human champions. But even if by some miracle Watson doesn't take the million-dollar top prize, computer scientists say its performance will be judged a triumph for artificial intelligence.

"Watson is clearly playing at a championship level," inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicts that A.I. will match human intelligence by the year 2029, told me today in an e-mail. "Note that it's only going to keep getting better. We cannot say that for unaided human intelligence."

Kurzweil said Watson merits the high praise he bestowed upon the machine after seeing its performance in last month's public practice round. In his essay on KurzweilAI.net, he said computers had "not shown an ability to deal with the subtlety and complexity of language" ... until Watson came onto the scene.

"Watson is a stunning example of the growing ability of computers to successfully invade this supposedly unique attribute of human intelligence," Kurzweil wrote. He said that level of language understanding, combined with a well-programmed aptitude for pattern recognition, would make Watson's descendants "far superior to a human."

Alien intelligence
Boris Katz, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who pioneered the development of natural-language question-answering systems, agrees that Watson is a wonder. "IBM did a fantastic job," he told me. But he said Watson's foibles also show that a computer's brand of intelligence is still alien to us.

When Watson is good, it's very, very good. But when it is bad, it's horrid. For example, one of the clues dropped during a practice round was: "This trusted friend is the first non-dairy powdered creamer." The correct answer was "Coffee-mate," but Watson gave a nonsensical non-non-dairy reply: "What is milk?"

Another example: On Monday, "Jeopardy" rival Ken Jennings gave a wrong answer for the decade when Oreo cookies were introduced (the '20s), and Watson followed up with what was basically the same answer. ("What is 1920s?") It was left to the third contestant, Brad Rutter, to come up with the right answer (the 1910s). Expert observers assume that Watson flubbed the answer because it didn't catch the fact that the '20s and the 1920s were just two different ways to refer to the same decade.

"When you look at the blunders, you realize that they did not build a machine that thinks like us," Katz said. "The success of Watson does not bring us closer to the understanding of human intelligence. When we observe it making these mistakes, that should remind all of us that this problem is still with us, and it's waiting to be solved."

Overconfident computer?
Watson draws upon 15 trillion bytes of information in its memory banks, the equivalent of 200 million pages of text, and ranks the  potential answers for a given clue using 2,880 parallel processor cores in its 90 computer servers. If the highest-scoring answer exceeds its built-in "confidence threshold," it'll buzz in. If no answer scores high enough to reach the threshold, Watson will keep mum. At least theoretically.

"We're seeing already that there are times when Watson really doesn't have enough information to have a good answer, but has the 'confidence' to give an answer anyway," said Eric Nyberg, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who helped program the supercomputer.

Despite Watson's occasional missteps, Nyberg is proud of the computer's overall prowess, as well as the speed with which it's answering the "Jeopardy" questions. "I was pleasantly surprised that Watson was able to buzz in against Ken [Jennings], because in all of 'Jeopardy,' he's the guy with the fastest trigger finger," he told me.

Today, during an interview on MSNBC, Jennings acknowledged that Watson has "an edge on that buzzer that human reflexes have a hard time keeping up with." He also acknowledged that the pressure was on, big time, going into the final round. (Jennings actually knows who won, since the three shows were taped last month under tight security.)

 "The computer can't get stage fright, it can't get discouraged or frustrated. It's like 'Terminator,' it's just going to keep coming," Jennings said. "And so the human race is going to have to play probably aggressively here — big bets where necessary, play recklessly to win." 

On Wednesday, TV viewers will find out how this particular man-vs.-machine match ends. But the computer scientists emphasized that this is just the beginning for Watson and its successors. "The fact that it's this fast, and this accurate, and its abilities allow it to do this well at 'Jeopardy' means that question-answering technology is really ready for prime time," Nyberg said.

Watson was built to serve up quiz-show knowledge, but those question-answering capabilities would probably be most valuable in specialized fields such as medicine and law. Watson's kin could help us puny humans sift through millions of possibilities and come up with the five or six best medical diagnoses, or legal precedents, or chemical configurations, or ... well, you name it.

"We're not thinking about applications where there isn't a human in the loop," Nyberg said. "We're definitely talking about an intelligent information agent that's working with a human."

What do you think? Will Watson win this week's showdown? Will question-answering machines become our most reliable advisers? Or will this turn into a replay of "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Correction for 12:20 a.m. ET Feb. 16: Error! Error! I've fixed the humans' totals at the end of the first game, and have corrected The Associated Press' figures in the referenced story as well.

More human-vs.-machine matches:

• Chess computer beats world's best player
• Checkers computer becomes invincible
• Poker-playing robot beats human pros
• New Scientist: Computer beats human at Japanese chess

Join the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the blog's Facebook page or following b0yle on Twitter.

Seth Wenig / AP

"Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings, left, and Brad Rutter, right, look on as an IBM computer called "Watson" beats them to the buzzer to answer a question during a practice round of the "Jeopardy!" quiz show in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., Jan. 13.

How smart is your favorite search engine? If the game show "Jeopardy" is a guide, it's just about as smart as the average human.

Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, the brains behind WolframAlpha, tested how often the correct answers to "Jeopardy" questions appear in the title or text snippets of the results page on Google, Bing, and a handful of other search engines. He didn't include WolframAlpha, his own search engine, because it uses a different type of technology.

Google displayed the right answer on its result page 69 percent of the time. Ask.com's page had the correct answer 68 percent of the time. Bing registered a 63 percent success rate, and Yandex came in at 62 percent. Blekko (58 percent) and Wikipedia search (23 percent) performed worse than the average human, who gets 60 percent of Jeopardy questions correct.

WolframAlpha

This chart shows the comparative success of several search engines at answering "Jeopardy" questions.

Of course Ken Jennings, the all-time winning champ of the game show in which players buzz in to provide questions that go with answers displayed on a screen, gets 79 percent correct, meaning that basic search engines have a way to go beat the best in the game.

That's where the IBM Watson supercomputer comes in. Next month, "Jeopardy" will air a series of shows in which the question-answering machine goes head-to-head against Jennings and Brad Rutter, another champ, for a $1 million prize. We already know that Watson bested the two Jeopardy whizzes in a test run this month, and the tournament shows have already been taped. Any bets on who's the winner?

The buzz over the human-vs.-machine match inspired Wolfram to conduct the search engine test as part of a thought exercise comparing his WolframAlpha technology, which is built on a different paradigm, to Watson.

He says IBM's machine is great for answering questions from unstructured data. This has potential real-world applications such as mining medical documents or patents, and doing discovery in litigation, he notes in a blog post about his test.

WolframAlpha technology, on the other hand, can be used to "investigate structured data in completely free-form unstructured ways," he writes. He goes on to explain:

"One asks a question in natural language, and a custom version of WolframAlpha built from particular corporate data can use its computational knowledge and algorithms to compute an answer based on the data — and in fact generate a whole report about the answer."

So where does Wolfram stand on the human-vs.-machine battle? The last line of Wolfram's blog post provides a pretty big hint about where his sympathies lie: "Good luck on 'Jeopardy'! I'll be rooting for you, Watson."

More stories on Watson and Jeopardy:

• Computer beats 'Jeopardy' champs in test round
• Supercomputer plays 'Jeopardy'
• IBM computer taking on 'Jeopardy' champs for $1M
• 'Jeopardy' streak comes to an end