The abacus, that was a calculator. Then the electronic calculator such as Casio came out, hold in our hands put in our pocket. The classical computer was a calculator. Now we see this quantum mechanics calculator actually complete the calculations in an algorithm, in 200 seconds which would have take millions of years on a regular super-computer. The calculation that was completed, that was legit, the calculations were correct, as I think I read in the SCMP newspaper online, that they had to break up the algorithm into smaller parts so other scientist could run their tests to confirm the results, reproduce the same mathematical results.
This means this calculator works. This means this quantum computer actually works.
What the Chinese team built so far, is photonic and scalable.
The speed of light, that is a constant (I think it is, lol!).
The input, should be constantly good. And the scalability factor is just the natural next step. If the photon is going at the speed of light, then there could be a lot of those mirrors, crystals, and splitters in the system. I don't think the photon slows down.
They say that this current quantum computer is not programmable, because they designed it to solve only one algorithm.
But they can just build the exact machine, 8 times let's say. Then they can configure it to solve some other problem.
That algorithm that was solved, that sounded like it was very unique. But that is what maybe is how we should think what they would be doing. Would they use a quantum computer to replicate the math of the abacus? No. The quantum computer will do the stuff the super computer cannot do.
What I think I am saying, maybe we have arrived at the quantum computer era, and this thing actually works. It can only do specialized calculations, but only it can do it.
What it is not, we do not open a text file and write code for it in C or C++ or whatever. Compile that into executable program and run it on the quantum computer. That seems to be far away still.
It seems that if there is some algorithm and if they can configure a scaled up version of the same machine they have now, they might be able to run another configure programmed algorithm any way they want. Essentially that is what they want the quantum computer to do!?
But that means, the quantum computer is already here!
If the quantum computer is already here, then that is a big deal.
Sure, this was an experiment, but did the experiment go so well that this already a close prototype?
