Lecture 7

Question 1

How does quantum computing break RSA cryptography?

Answer 1

Quantum computing allows us to easily compute the order of a vlue that will allow RSA encryption to be broken.

Question 2

What are the two main issues for quantum computing?

Answer 2

The error rates of the various components of quantum computers are too high, currently at a few percent.
There are also problems with decoherence, due to the fact that quantum computers cannot be completely isolated from the universe and so environmental interactions can occur(small random measurements causing collapse of the wave function).

Question 3

Can quantum computing error checking for qubits be done?

Answer 3

yes, but it requires a lot of extra qubits (15,000 physical qubits to create one error-corrected logical qubit, with a physical error rate of 0.1%).