Companies involved in the field are currently sitting on computers of the order of less than qubits; in comparison, recent studies have shown that it would take about 20 million qubits to break the algorithms behind public-key cryptography. Attackers could be intercepting all of our data and storing it all, waiting for a quantum computer to come along. For years now, Microsoft researchers have been working with academics and scientists to unlock the riddles of quantum computing , a field that aims to merge the mysterious properties of quantum mechanics with computing. By Jennifer Doudna. Related Topic Pages. But nature has its own method. Toggle navigation. Using a Monte Carlo simulation technique powered by the quantum evolution of the Ising model, the team evaluated this phenomenon in microscopic detail. Travis S Humble.