[extropy-chat] A Quantum Computer on the market by 2008?

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:04 PM 6/27/2005 -0400, JKC wrote:

><http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/issue/forward_quantum.asp>http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/issue/forward_quantum.asp

a friend comments:

This sounds completely screwy to me. Factoring large numbers is *easier*
than the traveling salesman problem: the latter is NP-complete, while the
factoring problem falls short of NP-completeness. The last time I looked
into these issues with regard to quantum computing, I read claims that it
was still undetermined whether quantum computers could "crack" the general
NP-complete problem, but it was known that they could do quick factoring.
D-Wave seems to be claiming that they have a solution to the hard problem
that isn't yet capable of handling an easier problem.