4 ms·
No worries on the typo, and sorry if I said something dumb :) - I know I have something to learn here. I'm a layperson whose knowledge is basically the first c
by 1001101 5y ago
No worries on the typo, and sorry if I said something dumb :) - I know I have something to learn here. I'm a layperson whose knowledge is basically the first chapter of an introductory undergrad text (although when I have time, I will dig into more). Perhaps I didn't get the terminology right, but I was thinking in terms of their total addressable market, depending on the quantity and quality of the qubits, they wont' be able to hand the keys to the castle of public key cryptography (so Shor's algorithm) to just anyone. Maybe that's baked into their business plan. Then I thought of some ways one might still probably get a bit done in this respect with a smaller number of qubits if SAT is in BQP (very half-baked idea), but from what I googled, it sounds like that's an open question.
- krastanov 5y agoI can not know for sure, but I doubt that this worry is on their mind. By the time these machines are reliable enough to do prime factorization, we would have had plenty of opportunities to move to "post quantum" public cryptography schemes that are as resilient to quantum attacks as they are to classical (cloudflare and google chrome have already implemented experimental HTTPS variants that are resilient). I doubt that Shor's algorithm would ever be a "killer app", because only a small fraction of encryption algorithms are susceptible to such an attack (it is not too far fetched to say that it is just a historical happenstance that our standard public encryption schemes happen to be susceptible).
- 1001101 5y agoI see my error, and I will sleep better at night (these are things I worry about). Thanks for your time!