gxiv

That could definitely be partly the case! After reconsidering it's definitely not fair to attribute the regions success entirely to RIM. It also probably has a lot to do with the University of Waterloo, which (being much more recently founded than other Canadian universities) has always had more forward thinking STEM programs and faculty, and also has much better IP protection for students than other schools in the area.

This is what happened in Waterloo, Ontario with Blackberry. Of course the tech scene there is no where near as large as a SV and a couple others, but it's still weirdly big and concentrated given the size of the surrounding city. Every mid to large tech company in that area has a decent size cohort of ex-blackberry people.

> It involves calculating the inputs to a complicated mathematical process, based solely on its jumbled outputs.

Without going any deeper, this description of the problem is interesting because quantum algorithms are (by design) fully reversible, which isn't the case for classical computers (you lose information about the input when going through an OR gate, for example). Knowing that, it almost seems like a no-brainer that quantum computers would be better at this kind of problem than classical ones.

Going by their description of the problem, it looks like it's distinct from how all the mainstream post quantum algos (LWE, NTRU, SIDH, etc) work.

Edit: I've finished the article lol. Now I'm not so certain that this is 100% distinct from something like LWE.