Quantum computers an 'exotic possibility', MIT professor says

Scott Aaronson, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave his views on the future of quantum technology in an interview with The Washington Post. Here are some excerpts:

The idea of quantum computing was proposed in the 1980s by physicists like Richard Feynman and David Deutsch, but it wasn't obvious that a quantum computer would be good for anything.

The only application people could see immediately was you could use a quantum computer to simulate quantum mechanics. That's sort of obvious.

The big discovery that sort of got people excited about this field was when Peter Shor discovered in [1994] that [if you had a quantum computer], you could use it to find the prime factors of enormous numbers.

That's a practical problem we don't know how to solve with [conventional] computers in any reasonable amount of time.

People care about it because the security of e-commerce is based on the difficulty of finding prime factors. If you can do that you can break most of the cryptography on the internet.