Gabriella Lanziani
Gabriella Lanziani received her Bachelor Degree in Literature and her Master Degree in History. Her academic interests lie primarily in linguistics, with a particular focus on the structural and semantic properties of language and their potential applications in information theory and cryptography. Her research explores how linguistic analysis - especially syntax, semantics, and pattern recognition - can contribute to the understanding of code systems, cryptographic communication, and natural language processing in cybersecurity contexts.
Session
What do Niccolò Machiavelli and Grover's Algorithm have in common? More than you think. While one mastered the art of political manipulation in the 1500s, the other promises a quadratic speedup for quantum key search. But when these two worlds collide, something unexpected happens: The quantum oracle misfires.
In this talk, we build Grover search oracles directly from Renaissance Italian texts —
Il Principe, Orlando Furioso, Il Cortegiano, I Ricordi — and measure exactly how much
linguistic redundancy contracts the cipher key space. We then simulate those oracles on a real quantum statevector and watch the standard iteration formula get it catastrophically wrong.
We will dive into:
- The Corpus-Driven Oracle: How character-level n-gram redundancy defines the fraction of "good" keys p_good — the sole parameter governing both classical exhaustive search and Grover oracle call count.
- The Discrete Resonance Failure: At one statistical threshold, the textbook formula predicts 2 optimal iterations. The real quantum simulation needs 24 — making quantum search four times slower than classical at that point. We dissect why.
- The L=600 Transition Zone: An empirical anomaly where stylistic variance in 16th-century prose (Latin citations, proper-noun lists) creates a chaotic instability band that separates statistical noise from structural reality.
- QUBO vs. Grover: Why compressing a 23-letter alphabet to 7 letters breaks the annealer but leaves the quantum oracle unaffected — and what that tells us about attack-surface geometry.
Join us for a journey where orthography meets qubits, proving that whether you hold a quill or a
quantum processor, redundancy is the enemy of secrecy — but discrete arithmetic is the enemy
of quantum speedup.