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cwillu12/09/20241 replyview on HN

O(sqrt(N)) is easily dominated by the relative ease of constructing much bigger classical computers though.


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adastra2212/09/2024

Uh, no? Not for large N.

There are about 2^152 possible legal chess states. You cannot build a classical computer large enough to compute that many states. Cryptography is generally considered secure when it involves a search space of only 2^100 states.

But you could build a computer to search though sqrt(2^152) = 2^76 states. I mean it'd be big--that's on the order of total global storage capacity. But not "bigger than the universe" big.

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