U2L5b.txt

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And why is factoring so important?
So back in, I believe, the 70s, Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman,
who were at MIT at the time--
and Ron Rivest still is--
a public key cryptosystem based on factoring.

And that was used for secure transactions over the internet.

And it is also undoubtedly used by many countries
to keep their secrets secret when they transmit them.
So if you could break RSA, well, there
are probably a number of people who
would pay an incredible amount of money
for a factoring algorithm.

And so far, there is no quick factoring algorithm
on a classical computer.
So 500 digit numbers, nobody knows
how to break them on a classical computer.
Now, if you had a big enough quantum computer,
we know how to break them.

So that's why factoring is important
and why when the factoring result came out,
everybody suddenly started paying a lot of attention
to quantum computing.