People have been searching for the applications of quantum computers -- excluding the adiabatic QC's associated with D-Wave, which are somewhat in a different c

People have been searching for the applications of quantum computers -- excluding the adiabatic QC's associated with D-Wave, which are somewhat in a different class. I found this part of the article very interesting regarding applications: "[Mathias] Troyer has spent the past three years looking for an answer—a 'killer app' for quantum computing that would make the development costs worthwhile. The two classic examples, code-cracking and searching databases, are not good enough, says Troyer. Shor's algorithm will require thousands of qubits to do any serious factorization, he says, and there are other forms of encryption that a quantum computer would do nothing to solve. And although quantum computers may search databases faster, they are still limited by the time it takes to feed the data into the circuit, which would not change. "Troyer thinks that a much more fruitful application for the near future is the modelling of electrons in materials and molecules—something that quickly becomes too difficult for today's supercomputers. At first, this, too, seemed a long shot. His early estimates suggested that it would take a quantum computer as long as 300 years to simulate the molecular dynamics of even a small molecule—such as the iron sulphide inside the ferredoxin proteins that are involved in nitrogen fixation in plants. “Clearly, that was on the border of being science fiction,” he says. But by rewriting the software, he brought the figure down to 30 years—then to just 300 seconds. “Just like in classical computing, where one has to sit down and optimize the algorithm,” he says, “the same is needed for a quantum algorithm.”