The paper's formatting clearly went wrong here, as it should have read p = 2^n - 1 and q = 2^m + 1.
The "Proposed Quantum Factorisation Evaluation Criteria" are excellent, but for measuring progress, the required minimum factor size of 64 bits is too large. A good milestone would be a quantum circuit that can factor the product of any pair of 5-bit primes {17,19,23,29,31}.
All those other applications, no matter how neat, I feel are quite niche. Like, "simulate pairs of electrons in the Ising model". Cool. Is that a multi-billion dollars industry though?
Or as another example, I'm currently at a conference listening to a PhD student's research on biomolecular structure prediction (for protein design).
I'm not sure that is true in the way it is intended. The NMOS transistors used in the 6502 were quite large and worked on the basis of electrostatic charges ... as opposed to bipolar transistors that are inherently quantum in operation.
Of course it is now understood that everything that does anything is at some level dependent on quantum effects. That would include the dog...
Forming a conductive channel in silicon in any FET and semiconductivity in general is an inherently quantum effect too, right?
However, in order to design and simulate a MOS transistor and most of the other semiconductor devices you do not need to use any quantum physics.
This should be made obvious by the fact that both the metal-semiconductor transistor (i.e. MESFET, patent filed on 1925-10-22) and the depletion-mode metal-insulator-semiconductor transistor (i.e. depletion-mode MOSFET, patent filed on 1928-03-28) have been invented at a time when quantum theory was just nascent, not yet applicable to semiconductors and certainly unknown to the inventor (Julius Edgar Lilienfeld; despite the fact that the FET operating principles were obvious, the know-how for making reproducible semiconductor devices has been acquired only during WWII, as a consequence of the development of diode detectors for radars, which generated the stream of inventions of semiconductor devices after the war ended).
For designing MOSFETs, you just need to use classical electrodynamics, together with several functions that provide the semiconductor material characteristics, like intrinsic free carrier concentration as a function of temperature, carrier mobilities as functions of temperature and impurity concentrations (and electric field at high fields), ionization probabilities for impurities, avalanche ionization coefficients, dielectric constants, and a few others.
It would be nice if instead of measuring experimentally all the characteristic functions for a semiconductor material one could compute them using quantum theory, but that is currently not possible.
So for semiconductor device design, quantum physics is mostly hidden inside empirically determined functions. Only few kinds of devices, e.g. semiconductor lasers, may need the use of some formulas taken from quantum physics, e.g. from quantum statistics, but even for them most of their mathematical model is based on classical physics.
So only a quantum effect to the extent all effects are at some level quantum.
Brilliant.
> To my knowledge, no one has cheated at factoring in this way before. Given the shenanigans pulled by past factoring experiments, that’s remarkable.
[1] https://sigbovik.org/2025/; standalone paper is also available in the code repository https://github.com/strilanc/falling-with-style
[2] Who has previous experience in cheating at quantum factoring: see "Factoring the largest number ever with a quantum computer", posted April Fools' Day 2020 at https://algassert.com/post/2000
I really hope he eventually gets the recognition he deserves, outside of just experts in the field.
It starts here: https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2025-Februar...
This part is from farther down thread:
"Just as a thought experiment, what's the most gutless device that could perform this "factorisation"? There's an isqrt() implementation that uses three temporaries so you could possibly do the square root part on a ZX81, but with 1k of RAM I don't think you can do the verification of the guess unless you can maybe swap the values out to tape and load new code for the multiply part. A VIC20 with 4k RAM should be able to do it... is there a programmable calculator that does arbitrary-precision maths? A quick google just turns up a lot of apps that do it but not much on physical devices.
Peter.
"The dog is funny but it just means, pick actually "random" numbers from a bigger range than the staged phony numbers quantum factorisation uses.
(Beware of typo pointed out by tromp here.)
