KEYS X QNTM CMPTR

Nations have devised ingenious ways of constructing the key that encodes their messages. For example, the key may be based on factorizing a large number. It’s easy to factorize the number 21 as the product of 3 and 7. Now let’s say that you have an integer of 100 digits, and you ask a digital computer to rewrite it as the product of two other integers. It might take a digital computer a century to be able to factorize this number. A quantum computer, however, is so powerful that in principle it can effortlessly crack any such code. A quantum computer quickly outperforms a standard computer on these huge tasks.