> And that's why those "optical" computers perform no better than electrical computers: because they are in fact electrical computers that use photons for commu

> And that's why those "optical" computers perform no better than electrical computers: because they are in fact electrical computers that use photons for communication, not for computation. No, in this case photons would be doing computation across a substrate with electrons in it. Similarly, in electronics the electrons do the computation on a doped substrate. We don’t say the doping is doing the computation, although it defines what the computation will be (I.e. the logical behavior).