Hard to say. My first instinct is probably not a whole lot. It's more or less conventional wisdom in the field that quantum computers are unlikely to be able t

Hard to say. My first instinct is probably not a whole lot. It's more or less conventional wisdom in the field that quantum computers are unlikely to be able to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. The argument for this conventional wisdom is heuristic (and certainly open to doubt, maybe most people are wrong), and it's in this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9701001 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9701001 But in any case, it's one thing for something to be widely believed, and another thing to have hard evidence. People might respond quite dramatically to such evidence.