[Cryptography] NSA and cryptanalysis

[Jerry Leichter]

On Aug 31, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Ray Dillinger wrote:
> ...  It is both
> interesting and peculiar that so little news of quantum computing has been
> published since.
I don't understand this claim.  Shor's work opened up a really hot new area that both CS people and physicists (and others as well) have rapidly jumped into.  There's been a huge amount of publication on quantum computing and, more generally, the field of quantum information.  No one - at least publicly - claims to know how to build a non-toy quantum computer here (the D-wave machine, if it's really doing quantum computation, is a special kind of machine and couldn't run Shor's algorithm, for example).  But there are many reported advances on the physics.  Simultaneously, there's quite a bit of published work on the algorithmic/complexity side as well.

A look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer will readily confirm this.  If you want to dig deeper, there's Scott Aaronson's blog at http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

                                                        -- Jerry