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Acronis and the Quantum Computer
A thrilling detective story for children over eight years old. The book will teach you, in an easy and understandable manner, how to solve a complicated cipher.
Download PDF pdf, 3.43 mb

Overview

The main character in the book is a 12-year old girl with red pigtails named Acronis.

Acronis is a fearless and restless girl from a modern English family. Her parents are in the process of a divorce, during which they sent their daughter to one of the best private boarding schools in England.

There she becomes immersed in an adventure involving encrypted letters and international terrorism from the very first day.

Acronis starts a project in quantum physics inspired by the charming young teacher, Ms. Holly. She learns a lot about photons: the particles of light.

The Scotland Yard comes to the school after Acronis’ roommate’s private letters are stolen.

A dramatic thriller unfolds in the heart of a peaceful British town.

See if you can become a spy

The Enigma machine

is an electro-mechanical cryptographic device used by the Germans in the Second World War. The machine transformed the text in a special way, changing it into a code.

The book cipher

is a cipher in which two figures are assigned to each letter. The first figure is a number of a line on the relevant page of a code book, the second figure correlates to the number of letter’s order in a line. Only the person who possesses the code book and the key with the page number is able to read the message.

The Caesar cipher

is a kind of a shift cipher used by the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar when corresponding with commanders of his legions. Every letter of the Roman alphabet stood for a letter shifted relatively to the first one on a certain number of positions. For example, instead of “A” Caesar wrote “D”, instead of “B” — “E”, “C” was turned into “F”, etc.

Alan Turing

was an outstanding English mathematician, the founder of Informatics and the author of the first computing algorithm. A group of British scientists, led by him, created the ‘Turing Bombe’ — a computer which decrypted the Enigma cipher.

Bombe,

one of the first computers, designed by Alan Turing and his colleagues. Bombe’s algorithm was trying different variants of the code until the result coincided with a given piece of text.

Colossus,

also invented by Turing, was an electronic machine ensuring a speed of 500 operations a second. Both a captured encrypted message and a decrypted piece (usually the first words or a signature) were entered into Colossus. The computer selected the key to the text fragment and predicted the rest of the message.

MI6

is a department of the British Secret Service that conducts secret operations abroad. The activities of MI6 are shrouded in mystery and connected with many legends. The first computers were created with their participation.

The Vernam cipher

is still considered to be one of the most reliable methods for encrypting radio messages. The letters of encrypted messages are entered in binary code.

About the author

Alexey Kavokin

Alexey Kavokin is a scientist in the fields of quantum physics and photonics. He is a Professor at the University of Southampton (the U.K.) and the Westlake University (China), Head of the Laboratory of Optics Spina at St. Petersburg State University (Russia), a Principal Investigator at the Russian Quantum Centre, and a Scientific Director of the Mediterranean Institute of Fundamental Physics (Italy).
Alexey is also the author of a series of children books: “Saladin the Cat”, “Man of Science”, “English fairy-tales”, “Italian fairy-tales”, and “Acronis Chronicles”, in which Acronis, the main character of this book, appears for the first time. They are full of adventures, nice cooking recipes, and unordinary scientific paradoxes, explained in a language clear enough for intellectually curious readers of any age.