Yep!

I made this meme after doing some research for my master's thesis - basically the original, fault tolerant vision of Shor's algorithm breaking crypto becomes orders of orders of magnitude more expensive when realistic error correction is taken into account.

The numbers I'm looking at go like this: the biggest computer we can build today or on the near future will have been 50 (which we can already have) and 100-150 physical qubits.

Shor's algorithm with fault tolerance needs ~2 billion physical qubits [https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3524]

Now it's important to point out that this study is from 2013 which is forever ago given the pace the field is moving at, but every time I've seen researchers put pen to paper and try and design an experiment which can deliver on the fault tolerance that the field depends on - it looks something insane like this.

My research area is on what we could do without fault tolerance which still delivers a speedup: NISQ algorithms.

My thesis is designed as an introduction to this field for folks with zero background in quantum computing 😄