[ohvirginia]

Quadratic in size of input is just the multiplication table of the radix units in some base (in their case binary).

It's interesting and I think promising approach to factoring is to use annealing over such a multiplication table trying to resolve the intermediate radix unit products and carries. It's a good way to map the problem to a solution space that is obviously a solution landscape that can be explored.

It's true that the number of variables they end up with is still exponential in the bits of input, but then again, that's not really a problem for true quantum computers.

It definitely seems factorization is closer to being publicly broken.