Solid State Quantum Computer Finds 15=3x5 — 48% of the Time

mikejuk writes "The Shor quantum factoring algorithm has been run for the first time on a solid state device and it successfully factored a composite number. A team from UCSB has managed to build and operate a quantum circuit composed of four superconducting phase qubits. The design creates entangled bits faster than before and the team verified that entanglement was happening using quantum tomography. The final part of the experiment implemented the Shor factoring algorithm using 15 as the value to be factored. In 150,000 runs of the calculation, the chip gave the correct result 48% of the time. As Shor's algorithm is only supposed to give the correct answer 50% of the time, this is a good result but not of practical use."

Comments

Re:Can someone explain...

[Wraithlyn]

There should be a "-1 Bitching That This Doesn't Meet My Personal Criteria For News" mod. Every. Damn. Article. Somebody has to come write an essay on how completely not interesting or impressive this is to them.

Yes, factoring 15 isn't particularly impressive. Thank you, Captain Fucking Obvious.

Now if you'd bothered to RTFA, you'd have noted it already directly discusses this:

Of course, factoring 15 isn't something that is going to threaten the PKI and cryptography in general, but factoring larger numbers is just a matter of increasing the number of qubits and this approach does seem to be a scalable solid state approach.

So they can instantly factor numbers (well, with ~50% success), with an approach that *seems scalable*. That's news to me.

Maybe in a few months, there will be another story about how they failed to scale this approach up. That will be an additional piece of news. Failure can be news.

Some of us are interested in the journey, not just the destination.