“It was just a thought experiment until 1994, when mathematician Peter Shor hit upon a killer app: a quantum algorithm that could find the prime factors of massive numbers. Cryptography, the science of making and breaking codes, relies on a quirk of math, which is that if you multiply two large prime numbers together, it’s devilishly hard to break the answer back down into its constituent parts. You need huge amounts of processing power and lots of time. But if you had a quantum computer and Shor’s algorithm, you could cheat that math. [..] D-Wave pulled in $100 million from investors like Jeff Bezos and In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.”
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/quantum-computing
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