My friends in the industry tell me that predicting protein folding is a popular civilian use case.

Seems like the easiest way to use quantum mechanics to predict how a protein will fold might be to actually build that protein and watch.

yes, because watching molecules is easy…right?

For civilian applications, sure. But Shor’s seems like a good enough reason for defense and defense have deep enough pockets to get this somewhat rolling.

Grover has some plausible applications as well as Shor.

And Shor is based on quantum superior FFT if I recall correctly, which could have applications outside of discrete log.

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert on this stuff, I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong because there are real pros on here.

The special purpose is figuring out what the special purpose is :)