Gilles Brassard and Charles Bennett have been awarded the 2025 A. M. Turing Award for founding quantum information science. The ACM prize, worth $1 million, recognizes their pioneering work dating back to the 1970s on using quantum phenomena for computation and communication. Their most notable contribution is the 1984 BB84 quantum key distribution protocol, which showed that any eavesdropping attempt on a photon stream would destroy the intercepted data, making interception detectable. This is the first time the Turing Award has recognized work related to quantum physics.
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