You know your family is super into football so you try and think of some way of relating it to that. This was not going to be easy.
“So imagine that you’re the QB trying to call in an audible,” you got your dad’s attention. Look at you talking about sports “but he doesn’t want the defense to know what the play’s going to be so what does he do?”
“They have their own code,” your dad says
“Exactly, in classical cryptography, we can make these codes using prime numbers in a way that it would take thousands of years for normal computers to crack the code so it would be like the defense trying multiple times to back solve the QB’s code. Now with quantum computers, that same code can be solved much faster and the defense can try a bunch of different times simultaneously to figure out the QB’s secret code.”
“Wait wait, I’m lost, they only have one chance to stop the play,” your dad protests. “And how would they solve it faster with quantum computers, is that someone watching last weeks game or something?”
“Uh, sort of, it’s like you can just kinda brute force it, and need something more complex against this new paradigm,” you started fighting off the urge to bring out your technical jargon and proofs. You’re not sure how your family is receiving your analogy or if they’re making the right connections.
What do you do?