QUANTUM COMPUTER PERFORMS FIRST SUCCESSFUL FACTORING

[ciphergoth]

QUANTUM COMPUTER PERFORMS FIRST SUCCESSFUL FACTORING

IBM SCIENTISTS BUILD MACHINE THAT SOLVES MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS WITH QUANTUM MECHANICS

NUMBER 15 FACTORED

FACTORS ARE 3 AND 5

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20011219_quantum.shtml

Comments

[aegidian]

Well, well.
As I recall, doesn't that mean that cryptography based on the difficulty of factoring is now pretty much pooched?

Gulp.

[babysimon]

Wow! Cool. I think.

But they appear to need a specific design of molecule to get 7 qubits - so this isn't going to scale. I like the quote "The first quantum computing applications would likely to be co-processors" -- as if people were thinking the market was about to be flooded with 1Gqb SIMMs.

But if they do manage to build a 16kqb machine (or however large a box one would need to brute-force RSA), this would lead to some serious asymmetry. We keep hearing about quantum crypto, but AFAIK that requires a special link between computers, and can only be done at the transport layer. Hardly something you can run over IP. Am I right? If so, I would like to wish everyone a happy goldfish bowl, like at the end of the Asimov story...

[jhg.livejournal.com]

NUMBER 15 FACTORED

FACTORS ARE 3 AND 5

Um, so what? I can do that in my head, really quickly.

Shouldn't a quantum computer be inventing FTL travel, and making people's undergarments disappear and reappear at the far side of the unverse, and that sort of thing?


J