In theoretical computer science, NP is the class of problems where it is easy to check an answer but (presumably) difficult to generate an answer. There are ma

In theoretical computer science, NP is the class of problems where it is easy to check an answer but (presumably) difficult to generate an answer. There are many, many problems in NP. However, quantum computers are not expected to be able to efficiently solve NP problems. Factoring is thought to be an easier sort of NP problem, known sometimes as NP-intermediate [1]. (This means it is in NP, but not "NP-complete.") So quantum computers have a chance at factoring efficiently, and in fact they do. There are other NP-intermediate problems like discrete logarithm that quantum computers can also solve, but NP-intermediate problems are not as common (in real life) as NP-complete problems and quantum computers still can't solve a lot of them as far as we know. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-intermediate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-intermediate