Cheating on Quantum Computing Benchmarks

A blog post discusses a paper by Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus claiming that widely cited quantum factorization results are inflated by choosing easy-to-factor numbers (e.g., where |p - q| is small) and relying on extensive classical preprocessing, with the largest legitimately factored number by a quantum computer being 35. The author expresses continued skepticism that practical RSA factorization via Shor’s Algorithm is imminent, emphasizing the significant engineering hurdles that remain.