[warpspin]

> This is ridiculous clickbait even for quantum computing standards. It might actually cross the threshold of being flag-worthy…

The discussion here where people explain in which ways it is misleading and thereby saving me lots of time reading this myself has a worth of itself IMHO.

Guess others might feel the same.

[bawolff]

Tl;dr: Factoring numbers is usually hard, but its only hard for some combinations of numbers. There are some types of numbers where its pretty easy. E.g. 15506 is easy to factor because it ends in a 6 which tells you its even and divisible by 2. So 2 is one of the factors.

When people talk about the factoring problem or RSA, they generally don't mean the super easy cases. They mean the hard cases which you would actually use in crypto.

Anyways this paper factors numbers where the two factors are super close to each other. This is generally very easy to factor as you can just take the square root and try guesses around there. Its so easy that you could probably do it in 15 minutes with a paper and pencil if you were so inclined (and were familiar with how to hand calculate square roots)

[I didnt actually read the paper]

[popol12]

Yup, I posted it for this reason.

[drob518]

Yes, please.