Hello, and welcome to Series Inquiries. Only this is episode 357. I'm your host, Thomas Smith here, and I'm excited to get you part two on quantum computing.

This part is about the current state of things, and if you're not in the know here, it might not be what you think. It's kind of interesting. I was blown away by some of this information.

Excited to get you back over with our expert Anne, who I'd love to tell you more about, but I don't know, because she works in the government and can't really tell us.

But she can tell us what she thinks about quantum computing and the current state of things, and so why don't we get right on over to that? Here we go.

This was a struggle and I apologize, but now let's just talk about that. I think I'm following at least enough to know the things we're talking about here, and you're saying this doesn't exist yet, but I thought I saw a picture of a refrigerator of a dill fridge.

Am I being a real dill fridge, or did I see exactly see a picture of a quantum computer, or is that fake?

We have quantum computers in the sense that we have qubits, so we can take a CD-ROM, and you can read out a 1 or a 0, and you can encode that as your superconducting phase, or your photon polarization, or you could use a trapped ion, whatever your flavor of choice is to have a qubit.

Those exist, but we are not at the point where somebody has built a quantum computer that could demonstrate Grover's algorithm, and certainly not Shor's algorithm.

I mean, I'm gotten a Shor's algorithm, okay.

Well, I say, I don't know, probably a lot of people out there have heard of Shor's algorithm, because...

No, because even if someone's heard of it, it doesn't, I mean, is it Polly Shor?

Is it Polly Shor? Is it who's...

Have you heard about how quantum computers are going to break all your passwords?

Yes. That's Shor's algorithm.

Okay, so that's not just like by default any quantum computer would be so cool that it would be able to break all that stuff.

That's specifically Howard Shor's algorithm, whatever.

You tell me what Shor it is, but that's a specific kind of these logic gates that we haven't implemented yet, or nobody's successfully implemented yet.

We've implemented the gates. They don't have enough qubits to do the algorithm.

Gotcha.

I'm going to look up what Shor's name is.

Have a qubit, buddy. I was trying to...

Yeah, Polly Shor is such a dated reference, but...

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