From Bits To Qubits — And Butterflies Causing Hurricanes

Flap your wings like a butterfly, and go change the world. Go innovate!

5 min readMar 13, 2025

I’ve been reading Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters by Dr Brian Klaas and John Murray [here], and it outlines that everything we do in our world has an effect on everything else. So, even the smallest of events can cause major changes in the course of our lives, and for the lives of others.

So you might take the bus instead of the car to work, and which will change your world and many other people’s worlds in some way. Perhaps by taking the bus, you twist your ankle on the way, and have to go to the hospital, and while you’re in the hospital you meet the person you will eventually fall in love with and marry. This new relationship inspires you to quit your boring job, and do research into cancer. You end up with a fantastic research career, and have three amazing kids, and seven grandchildren. For all your great work, you are awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and end the suffering of millions. But, if you took the car, you end up just going to work and coming back, and continue doing the same old job, never finding your soul-mate and living alone for the rest of your life. That’s chaos theory … everything you do, has an effect on everything else.

Goodbye Silicon, Hello to Quantum

Like it or not, quantum computers at scale are on our horizon, and they will bring a whole host of new opportunities for computation that will — quite literally — be a quantum leap. Perhaps Grover’s algorithm shows this best, where it is possible to compute 2¹²⁸ encryption keys within a reasonable time. With our existing computing for a 128-bit key and using brute force, it would take:

529 million million million years

to crack a single key for 10 billion tries per second. If fact, we would need the energy to boil every ocean on the planet, 16,384 times! However, a quantum computer — when built at scale — could set many parallel processes in motion to try each of the keys.

And, so, along with opportunities, quantum computers will bring risks, especially in breaking our existing public key encryption methods. Luckily, NIST are on the case, and has developed a whole new set of standards to replace RSA and ECC. These include Kyber (FIPS 204) and HQC for key exchange and public key encryption and Dilitium (FIPS 205), Falcon and SPHINCS+ (FIPS 206) for digital signatures.

However, the great opportunity is the massive scale-up of processing, and the move away from silicon being the limits to the speed of operation. Over the past few decades, we have roughly doubled our computation speeds every 18 months or so:

This speed-up has mainly happened through the miniaturisation of transistors, and where we are now looking at transistors which are only 4 nanometers in size. And, so, basically we can’t get much smaller. Luckily quantum computers will not have this constraint, and where we can move from bits to qubits, and replace our AND, OR and NOT gates with gates the perform 180 degree rotations on the x-axis (Pauli-X gate), 180 degree rotations on the y-axis (Pauli-Y gate) or 180 degree rotations on the z-axis (Pauli-Z gate).

And, so, our research has been scaled up in using these quantum circuits for processing. While we can just simulate them at the current time, the future with the opportunity to run the methods on a real quantum computer. One of these is [here]:

With this, Shabhaz has taken a chaotic method of encryption and converted it into a quantum-ready technique. With chaotic methods we have the butterfly effect, and where a small change can cause massive amounts of change — just like a butterfly that flaps its wings in one country could cause a hurricane in another country [here].

For this, the paper outlines how we can convert a classic image into a quantum image, and then apply a quantum algorithm for the encryption and decryption process [here]: