alt Hacker NewsFrom my limited understanding, that's actually the opposite of the truth.
In QC systems, the engineering "difficulty" scales very badly with the number of gates or steps of the algorithm.
Its not like addition where you can repeat a process in parallel and bam-ALU. From what I understand as a layperson, the size of the inputs is absolutely part of the scaling.
But the reason factoring numbers is used as the quantum benchmark is exactly that we have a quantum algorithm for that problem which is meant to scale better than any known algorithm on a classical computer.
So it seems like it takes an exponentially bigger device to factor 21 than 15, then 35 than 21, and so on, but if I understand right, at some point this levels out and it's only relatively speaking a little harder to factor say 10^30 than 10^29.
Why are we so confident this is true given all of the experience so far trying to scale up from factoring 15 to factoring 21?