[Cryptography] Has quantum cryptanalysis actually achieved anything?

[John Levine]

It appears that Jon Callas <jon at callas.org> said:
>>> "within ten years, a machine will be the World Chess Champion."
>> 
>> I wouldn't consider that a failed prediction.  He was only off by about 40 years. ...

>At the same time, if someone predicts event E in time T, and that event happens at time 4T, how is that a success? If it is a success, then aren't all the
>doomsday cults that have missed predictions of the world ending successful? I mean, it didn't happen today, and that's okay?

I think you can have a continuum of wrongmess based on the factor. In 1951
controlled fusion was a decade away and it's still a decade away for a factor of
at least 9 which is wronger than 4. Flying cars are also in the 9 range. There
was an intersting Atlantic article a few years ago about the extremely wrong
predictions about mass starvation from the population bomb, where the factor
is negative, it became clear that it wasn't going to happen several years before
the predicted date.

R's,
John


>(Cue the Bohr aphorism about how predictions are difficult, especially about the future.)

FYI, Bohr never said that. As far as anyone can tell it's an old Danish joke
first used in a speech in the 1940s by someone else. Nobody credited it to Bohr
until years after he died. Personally, I prefer to credit it to Yogi Berra who
never said it but should have.