So I joust found this brilliant scientific paper called “Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog” which mocks quantum computer researchers for optimising factorisation of prime numbers in a way, so that it is as easy as possible to calculate them with a quantum computer. While you may not understand the technical or mathematical explanations they include a lot of jokes and its very funny to read. One of the jokes is,that they call quantum computers a “physics experiment”, which is the explanation behind this joke.
Is this opinion piece implying that quantum computing researchers should stop researching because current quantum computers are currently less than proof of concept? Is technology supposed to be fully mature from the beginning?
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 1 week ago
In a way, regular computers are also physics experiments. As are fridges and cars. When does an experiment graduate to being a technology?
Ediacarium@feddit.org 1 week ago
Been a while since I read this paper, but:
The main criticism in this paper is, that the problems are asked and preprocessed in a way that makes them almost trivial. Basically, CPU manufacturers could boast about 10000% faster prime number factorization, if all they were doing was prime number factorization of 2^n^
They even suggest, that instead of solving known and borderline trivial problems, quantum computers should instead be evaluated using random problems.
^Also, they should thank their dog in the acknowledgement section^
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 1 week ago
Its basically what you said. They searched for ways to optimize the problem to the solution and not the solution to the Problem.
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Fair enough - sounds more like a problem with the specific study than with the quantum computer