Factorisation is the common example. You'll be able to factor gigantic numbers like an RSA public key pretty much instantaneously, as thanks to a qubit's super-

Factorisation is the common example. You'll be able to factor gigantic numbers like an RSA public key pretty much instantaneously, as thanks to a qubit's super-position of states you can operate on all possible states at once. But in general it's all about parallelisation - being able to perform an operation on all states (ie numbers) at once. Due to the probabilistic/uncertain nature of measurements of a quantum system though I believe operations have to be performed a number of times in order to build statistics around the "right" answer.