• @ster
    link
    14 years ago

    As I understand it though, quantum computers will have extremely high probability of getting the right answer out though, with the right algorithms. You wouldn’t say your account is insecure because someone could completely randomly guess your password

    • Ephera
      link
      14 years ago

      Yeah, I heard that, too, that the result will usually only narrow it down and then you’d use non-quantum computing to check the remaining possibilities.
      But these inaccuracies should only be allowed in the output. If you already read the input wrong, i.e. the wrong prime to factorize, or it just gets completely jumbled during the calculation, then the output won’t be an approximation, it’ll be completely wrong.

      But well, I’m also not scared, because I’ve also heard that for prime factorization to be viably fast, you would still need millions of qubits and we’re still in double digits.
      Also, these qubits currently have to be cooled to 1K and adding more qubits negatively impacts the stability of the other qubits, so it’s not like we’re on the verge of being able to massively increase the number of qubits.