About how far does this leave us from a usable quantum processor? How far from all current cryptographic algorithms being junk?
The latest versions of TLS already have support post-quantum crypto, so no, it's not all of them. For the ones that are vulnerable, we're way, way far off from that. It may not even be possible to have enough qbits to break those at all.
Things like simulating medicines, folding proteins, and logistics are much closer, very useful, and more likely to be practical in the medium term.
Is there gov money in folding proteins though? I assume there’s a lot of 3 letter agencies what want decryption with a lot more funding.
There's plenty of publicly funded research for that, yes.
Three letter agencies also want to protect their own nation's secrets. They have as much interest in breaking it as they do protecting against it.
At least a week, probably more
Maybe they can use the same techniques for keeping their product management and feature roadmap for more than an hour.
Just in time for the fall of American democracy. What could possibly go wrong.
Seeing quantum computers work will be like seeing mathemagics at work, doing it all behind the scenes. Physically (for the small ones) it looks the same, but abstractly it can perform all kinds of deep mathematics.
108 qubits, but error correction duty for some of them?
What size RSA key can it factor "instantly"?
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