Phil,
An article posted on sci.crypt stated that quantum factoring is real and that an article was posted in this month's Science magazine. The author of the post says this would make factoring a 10 bit number the same time as factoring a 100000000 bit number.
You can bet your ass and your mother's and grandmother's donatable organs that if this were possible, then the legislative initiatives currently underway would not be: they'd just let us use RSA and get a false sense of security.
A wonder how long it is before every major government in the world has one of these. Makes RSA's future kind of moot doesn't it??
Well, it would probably "prove" many-worlds right: in which case we're probably going to be invaded from the one where the Nazis won WWII, or the libertarians won Shay's Rebellion.
Yuk yuk. :> A minor adjustment to your comment: I haven't read the work yet, but if it's based on Shor and Simon, it only "proves" the existence of state superpositions (and perhaps some other mathematical things relating to the construction of unitary transforms) - a fact equally congenial to Many Worlds, Copenhagen, von Neumann, and most other interpretations of quantum mechanics. The only people who would likely be upset by this are the neo-materialists and other hidden-variable fetishists. I'm six hundred messages behind and not likely to catch up soon, so apologies if this has already been covered. - 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