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