Quantum Crypto: Anecdote

Given the regularity with which fears of factoring by quantum compters comes
up around here, I thought I'd share a brief story:

At a party last night, I ran into a couple of acquantances, and was 
delighted to learn that they are working on the current NIST quantum computing
project, making quantum gates out of atomic traps similar to those used
by Cornell and Weiman to get a Bose condensate with Rubidium (crypto relevance
comes from odd places, eh?) Anyway, I talked them up a bit, and so far they've
managed to construct a working "or" gate. The long-term project is to construct
a quantum computer capable of factoring 15, which they expect to take at
least several years.

I mentioned crypto and they literally laughed at me. The word from the 
trenches is "don't worry about it for a very long time."

                                   -- Will

> Given the regularity with which fears of factoring by quantum
> compters comes up around here, I thought I'd share a brief story: At
> a party last night, I ran into a couple of acquantances, and was
> delighted to learn that they are working on the current NIST quantum
> computing project, making quantum gates out of atomic traps similar
> to those used by Cornell and Weiman to get a Bose condensate with
> Rubidium (crypto relevance comes from odd places, eh?) Anyway, I
> talked them up a bit, and so far they've managed to construct a
> working "or" gate. The long-term project is to construct a quantum
> computer capable of factoring 15, which they expect to take at least
> several years.

Vazirani gave a talk at Parc a couple weeks ago, at which he described
a similar project under way at Los Alamos.  It's allegedly being
headed by Richard Hughes.

   - Mark -


--
Mark Chen 
chen@intuit.com
415/329-6913
finger for PGP public key
D4 99 54 2A 98 B1 48 0C  CF 95 A5 B0 6E E0 1E 1D