The Micius Quantum Prize is named after Micius, an ancient Chinese philosopher who lived during the similar period as the Western philosopher Democritus. The Micius Quantum Prize is dedicated for promoting the quantum information science and technology research. The revenue of the Micius Quantum Foundation is distributed in the form of prizes. Each honoree will receive a tax-free prize of one million Chinese yuan (about 150,000 US dollars) and a gold medal.
The Micius Quantum Prize recognizes significant science advance ranging from the early conceptual contributions to the recent experimental breakthroughs. The themes of the 2018 and 2019 Micius Quantum Prizes are quantum computation and quantum communications, respectively, which concentrate on those aspects of scientific contributions as following:
1. Seminal conceptual contributions that opened up the thriving field of quantum communications (including quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation), and/or quantum computation.
2. Invention of practical schemes and feasible methods that enabled physical implementations of scalable quantum communications and/or quantum computation.
3. Experimental realizations of the fundamental elements of quantum computers, and/or practically secure and large-scale quantum cryptographic networks.
About Micius
Micius (in Chinese pinyin Mozi) was a Chinese philosopher during the Hundred Schools of Thought period (early portion of the Warring States period of c.475–221 BC). A book named after him, the Mozi, contains material ascribed to him and his followers.
Micius strongly stand for peace, put forward the concept of "universal love", and performed strikingly original scientific work such as the pin-hole experiment that proved light travel straight. And his book contains some preliminary idea of Newton's first law of motion. It wrote: "The stop of motion is due to the opposing force... If there is no opposing force... the motion will never stop." Micius also held a belief that objects can infinitely divided into small piece, but there is smallest fundamental unit of particle, a concept with coincidence to our modern quantum physics. More details can be read from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi