3 ms·

You would find prime factors. What else would you expect to happen?

• lisper 12y ago
  Let me be a little more specific: how would the performance of finding prime factors using Shor's algorithm running on libquantum compare to classical factoring algorithms? I know it would be less efficient, but by how much? How many digits could I reasonably expect to factor in non-geologic time this way? How big a task would it be to code? Is this a reasonable experiment to try to do?
  • Tyr42 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure it would end up being slower, if only for the overhead. But don't take my word for it, go ahead and run it. I know it's not too hard to write gates for testing with QCViewer [https://github.com/aparent/QCViewer https://github.com/aparent/QCViewer], (Linux only for the moment, I'm just going to be improving and possibly porting it to OSX)
  • colanderman 12y ago
    It would be exponentially less efficient, as the simulation algorithm used represents and operates on all 2^n possible quantum states of n qubits. If you know nothing about QM, imagine the classical analogue: a classical CPU simulator with exactly one (say) 32-bit register, which, instead of being represented as 32 bits, is represented as 2^32 bits, exactly one of which is set to 1; the only way to determine which bit this is is to scan the entire array.