When the first quantum computer is plugged in and functioning, the perspectives for the field of computational physics will look rather promising, but until that day one has to restrict oneself to the mundane tools offered by classical computers. While experimental physicists are putting a lot of effort in trying to build the first quantum computer, theoretical physicists are searching, in the field of quantum information theory (QIT), for genuine quantum algorithms, appropriate for problems that would perform badly when trying to be solved on a classical computer, but pretty fast and successful on a quantum one. The search for such algorithms is still going, the best-known (and almost the only ones found) being the Shor's algorithm, for factoring large numbers, and Grover's search algorithm.