I think you're making the author's point: the "very small problems" are light years from the what what technology triumphalists imagine in sci fi novels. He's

I think you're making the author's point: the "very small problems" are light years from the what what technology triumphalists imagine in sci fi novels. He's not saying the concept is incomprehensible; he's saying that attaining that triumphalist dream is not conceivable based on current achievements. > Look at the immense amount of money and brain power being invested into quantum computing – a computer concept that makes no sense whatsoever outside a 1950s pulp sci-fi novel by L Ron Hubbard. Quantum computers make sense, a lot of sense, at least for some very specific problems. I'm not sure if the amount of error corrections will make them impractical for big interesting problems, but they are definitively working for very small problems. I appreciate your explanation of the importance of a 'time crystal'. > And this is what will be running our supercomputers in the future? Who needs an uninterruptible power supply when your computer runs on crystals that are in constant, repeating motion in time despite no external input? The idea is that the time crystals have a weird property at the minimum level of energy. If you want to explain it with common words, then something in them is rotating. The weird part is that you can stop them and use the break energy to power another like you can do stopping a classic flywheel. The "rotating" state is the minimum, and you can't extract energy from it to power a computer.