Quantum Crypto: Anecdote

["W. Kinney" <kinney@bogart.Colorado.EDU>]

Given the regularity with which fears of factoring by quantum compters comes
up around here, I thought I'd share a brief story:

At a party last night, I ran into a couple of acquantances, and was 
delighted to learn that they are working on the current NIST quantum computing
project, making quantum gates out of atomic traps similar to those used
by Cornell and Weiman to get a Bose condensate with Rubidium (crypto relevance
comes from odd places, eh?) Anyway, I talked them up a bit, and so far they've
managed to construct a working "or" gate. The long-term project is to construct
a quantum computer capable of factoring 15, which they expect to take at
least several years.

I mentioned crypto and they literally laughed at me. The word from the 
trenches is "don't worry about it for a very long time."

                                   -- Will