They've been making a lot of noise in the press about this, but since I'm on holidays I haven't been paying it any attention. My suggestion is to believe it when they start to make some money from it. While what they (and the Graun) say is very likely technically true, you can be fairly certain that the bajillion-times speed up only holds if you happen to want to solve a very specific, very pointless problem that it turns out that quantum computers are good at. For solving actual, every-day computational problems, not so much.
Since no-one is claiming that this thing rings in the death-knell of encryption (and therefore online commerce), you can be sure that it's not even up to the task of routinely cracking crypto keys, and if they could do that they would.
They've been making a lot of noise in the press about this, but since I'm on holidays I haven't been paying it any attention. My suggestion is to believe it when they start to make some money from it. While what they (and the Graun) say is very likely technically true, you can be fairly certain that the bajillion-times speed up only holds if you happen to want to solve a very specific, very pointless problem that it turns out that quantum computers are good at. For solving actual, every-day computational problems, not so much.
Since no-one is claiming that this thing rings in the death-knell of encryption (and therefore online commerce), you can be sure that it's not even up to the task of routinely cracking crypto keys, and if they could do that they would.
Hahahahah, we all know where this experiment ends, right?