Tomorrow’s Computer, Yesterday
By Simson Garfinkel in MIT Technology ReviewMIT Endicott House was recently featured in MIT Technology Review, which looked back at how the 1981 Physics of Computation Conference held at Endicott House helped launch the field of quantum computing. The article recounts the pivotal ideas shared there by Richard Feynman, Ed Fredkin, Rolf Landauer, and others, shows how their work on reversible computation and “simulating physics with computers” laid the conceptual groundwork for today’s quantum computers and cryptography, and highlights the now-iconic group photo taken on the Endicott House lawn of many of the era’s leading minds. Read an excerpt of the article below:
Quantum computing as we know it got its start 40 years ago this spring at the first Physics of Computation Conference, organized at MIT’s Endicott House by MIT and IBM and attended by nearly 50 researchers from computing and physics—two groups that rarely rubbed shoulders.
Twenty years earlier, in 1961, an IBM researcher named Rolf Landauer had found a fundamental link between the two fields: he proved that every time a computer erases a bit of information, a tiny bit of heat is produced, corresponding to the entropy increase in the system. In 1972 Landauer hired the theoretical computer scientist Charlie Bennett, who showed that the increase in entropy can be avoided by a computer that performs its computations in a reversible manner. Curiously, Ed Fredkin, the MIT professor who cosponsored the Endicott Conference with Landauer, had arrived at this same conclusion independently, despite never having earned even an undergraduate degree. Indeed, most retellings of quantum computing’s origin story overlook Fredkin’s pivotal role.
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