Everywhere in our lives (at work, school and at home), we are all connected to shared systems such as printers and hard drives. How does such a system create order, when we all send a print assignment to the same printer?
How can you be sure that a hard drive only shows you the latest version of a file?

Stephanie will review these concepts and introduce the concept of distributed systems.  We will determine what is the advantage of a quantum internet in this field of application.

Main takeaways

• A challenge in computing is to coordinate between different computers and different processors; a distributed system.
• Distributed systems are already known in classical computer science, where people have created protocols that can coordinate between different processors, even when these processors are behaving randomly.
• The key to solving an agreement problem, which is basically a series of messages that the processors will exchange with each other, in order to solve this problem. This is commonly known as Byzantine agreement problem.
• Quantum protocols can solve such tasks with a constant number of qubit rounds of communication, so a number of rounds that does not depend on how many processors there are within the network.