Alice & Bob: ~25,000 cat qubits could factor RSA-2048 in 3 days, slashing prior estimates
AryHHAry · x · 2026-11-11
Quantum computing company Alice & Bob published a new paper re-estimating Shor's algorithm resources: factoring a 2048-bit number — which would take today's supercomputers 400x the age of the universe — could be done end-to-end with 25,000 physical cat qubits in about 3.14 days, far below earlier estimates of 20 million or even 1 million qubits.
The key is architecture: cat qubits suppress bit-flips at the hardware level, so LDPC-cat error correction only needs to handle phase-flips, drastically cutting overhead. "Harvest-now-decrypt-later" stops being a slogan and becomes an engineering roadmap — the question is no longer if quantum breaking arrives, but when.
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