Holding the state space and iteratively transforming it (in a reversible way, so... | Hacker News

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		Nevermark 6 months ago \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet? Holding the state space and iteratively transforming it (in a reversible way, so the state space is preserved), seem like a solution to that. This would still require more hardware than digital circuits (which can be made reversible for energy efficiency, but that is rarely done). While still reducing the number of operation components, and reusing them.

adgjlsfhk1 6 months ago [–]

This is already done. Qbits is the size of the state space and gates is the measure of operations (like flops but quantum operations). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15917 shows a factoring algorithm using 1 million qbits and ~10^10 gates.

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