My assertion was also not specific to people knowledgeable in the field, just like the op’s colleague is not very knowledgable in RSA(at least I had assumed so). I consider the probability of a non-expert having said this to be to be close to 100%.
Be forewarned I am not an expert in the feild, but here are some interesting tidbits:
Thesis (Quantitative Church’s thesis). Any physical computing device can be simulated by a Turing machine in a number of steps polynomial in the resources used by the computing device”
Then:
If the precision of a quantum computer is large enough to make it more powerful than a classical
computer, …
edit:
Shor is suggesting that quantum computers break the Church thesis which implied that for any device it was impossible to solve RSA in poly time.
end edit.
Note that AFAIK Church did not state this “Quantitative Church’s thesis”—it’s hard to be sure because of the paywall, but I’d guess that this paper was the first to explicitly state it, and it did so in order to argue that it may not be true.
I could not tell which paper you are talking about. The paper I posted? It is not behind any pay wall for me. If not the paper I post which paper are you talking about I can try to look at it at work latter.
Don’t know what went wrong there—I have the paper now. Turns out I’m quite wrong, this idea is credited to:
P. van Emde Boas (1990), Machine models and simulations, in Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. A, J. van Leeuwen, ed., Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 1–66.
My assertion was also not specific to people knowledgeable in the field, just like the op’s colleague is not very knowledgable in RSA(at least I had assumed so). I consider the probability of a non-expert having said this to be to be close to 100%.
Be forewarned I am not an expert in the feild, but here are some interesting tidbits:
Then:
edit: Shor is suggesting that quantum computers break the Church thesis which implied that for any device it was impossible to solve RSA in poly time. end edit.
Both from quotes are from “Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer”—Peter W. Shor
Note that AFAIK Church did not state this “Quantitative Church’s thesis”—it’s hard to be sure because of the paywall, but I’d guess that this paper was the first to explicitly state it, and it did so in order to argue that it may not be true.
I could not tell which paper you are talking about. The paper I posted? It is not behind any pay wall for me. If not the paper I post which paper are you talking about I can try to look at it at work latter.
Don’t know what went wrong there—I have the paper now. Turns out I’m quite wrong, this idea is credited to:
P. van Emde Boas (1990), Machine models and simulations, in Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. A, J. van Leeuwen, ed., Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 1–66.