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I love when scientists mock each other
(thelemmy.club)
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.
In a way, regular computers are also physics experiments. As are fridges and cars. When does an experiment graduate to being a technology?
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^
Its basically what you said. They searched for ways to optimize the problem to the solution and not the solution to the Problem.
Fair enough - sounds more like a problem with the specific study than with the quantum computer
They are pointing out in this article that the way that the problem is devised for the computer makes it basically already solved. The quantum computer get a list of all the factors and, after a bunch of hand waving, picks one. Something a vic20 an abacus and a dog can all do too.
When people are purchasing their experiments from bestbuy?
So a supercomputer is a physics experiment? A lithography machine for producing microchips is a physics experiment?
I guess a fair threshold would be "when it can be run and maintained by engineers rather than scientists". In which case, many quantum computers are indeed physics experiments.