4 ms·
That's a great analogy, and I basically agree with it. But there would be some ancient, abacus-wielding mathematicians who would be impressed by this fast-but-u
by qnleigh 2y ago
That's a great analogy, and I basically agree with it. But there would be some ancient, abacus-wielding mathematicians who would be impressed by this fast-but-useless computer. One might take it as a sign that once/if the computer can be controlled properly, it might be quite useful.
This might have been part of the history of classical computers as well, except that it turns out to be pretty easy to do classical operations with very high fidelity.
- fluoridation 2y agoYeah... But since the device is not doing anything meaningful, there's no way to tell if it actually is computing anything, rather than being a very expensive and very complicated random number generator. Because you don't need a quantum computer to generate a stream of meaningless numbers, a machine being capable of generating a stream of meaningless numbers doesn't demonstrate whether it's computing quantumly.
- fluoridation 2y agoFurthermore, how do you distinguish successful runs from malfunctions?
- qnleigh 2y agoThat's a good question. They run the system on a small scale and validate there. The assumption is that no new error mechanism magically switches on when the simulation gets large enough, but it is did there would be no way to know. Hopefully large-scale, verifiable demonstrations become viable in the near future. But current they're just too hard to implement.