Rest in peace Jack Tramiel, Your approach of openness and documentation of computers, and making computers affordable was a godsend for many of us.
Commodore 64 claimed to outperform IBM's quantum system — sarcastic researchers say 1 MHz computer is faster, more efficient, and decently accurate
Submitted 6 months ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Buffalox@lemmy.world 6 months ago
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 6 months ago
Also, it has 8 hardware sprites. How many does IBM’s quantum system have?
palordrolap@kbin.social 6 months ago
Irony: The pictured computer is not a 1980s, 1MHz Commodore 64 but instead a 2010s, 2GHz C64x PC, a keyboard-housed x86 system that looks like a breadbin C64.
TheFlopster@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I agree. I knew the image in the thumbnail wasn’t a Commodore 64, because it had an @ symbol above the 2. Nope! Shoulda been quotation marks there (then).
But when I click on the article, I think that first picture is right. At least, it looks like what I remember.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The picture in the article is an original Commodore 64, the thumbnail however is not.
Where is the thumbnail from? Is it some sort of HTML extension when referencing something, that you can include a thumbnail, which is not visible when you read the article.
I see these “kind of fake” thumbnails everywhere!!!palordrolap@kbin.social 6 months ago
Someone in the article's own comments section makes the same assertion as me, so my guess is that they've corrected the image on the article and the Fediverse's various caches still have the original.
ares35@kbin.social 6 months ago
so, tom's swings-and-misses... again?
Treczoks@lemmy.world 6 months ago
As I said repeatedly: Wake me up on Quantum computers once they are capable to do something actually useful, and not just random worthless quantum benchmarks.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Same thing with fusion reactors.
All the current machines out there are for research purposes only. Nobody can currently power an arc furnace of a steel mill using only fusion power. Sure, there’s been some progress with fusion and quantum computing, but it takes a while to get to an actual practical application of the technology.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 6 months ago
While I am convinced that fusion will get somewhere practical in the near future, I have serious doubts on the practical viability of quantum computing.
Llewellyn@lemm.ee 6 months ago
As I said repeatedly
And who are you to emphasize that part?
Th4tGuyII@kbin.social 6 months ago
neuropean@kbin.social 6 months ago
I’ll believe it when they release the source code, so for now I’d remain skeptical until it’s reproduced.
Th4tGuyII@kbin.social 6 months ago
"...source code will only be supplied in one of three formats, they say: “a copy handwritten on papyrus, a slide-show of blurry screenshots recorded on a VHS tape, or that I dictate it to you personally over the phone.”
Technically speaking you could get your hands on the code if you were determined enouhh haha
mriormro@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s mostly a joke. How’d you miss that?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s because when Commodore made a computer, it made the hell out of it.
pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
NOT EVEN THE AMIGA, WHAT
obsolete@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Hail the c64!
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Me, an erudite who studied systems engineering: Will my flutter website compile on this quantum garbage?
Thorry84@feddit.nl 6 months ago
For those not in the know: The big issue with quantum computers is decoherence. This is (simply put) noise produced in the system, which interferes or overwrites the calculation / signal we want to get out of the computer. A large part of this is thermal energy, all that energy bouncing around destroys any chance of reading out the signal. So the solution would be to cool the machine within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, which is hard but not impossible. Then there’s also EM radiation coming from all around us (wifi and cellphones, but also things like radio), this is relatively easy to shield against. A bit of a pain, but still something that can be done. But then there’s cosmic rays, there’s a real chance a cosmic ray hits with enough energy to disrupt the calculation within milliseconds. Milliseconds isn’t enough to do a useful calculation, so that’s a problem. Shielding against this is also pretty hard, since cosmic rays can have a lot of energy.
Then there’s the issue of measurement itself, measuring automatically means putting in energy to the system. This means it’s very hard (or maybe even impossible) to read out the results, without destroying them. Even if you get the damn thing stable enough to do a useful calculation.
The more qubits a system, the more powerful it becomes, and you need quite of a number of them to do anything useful with the machine. But the more qubits the bigger the decoherence issue.
This is why some people (me included) don’t believe the current form of quantum computers we are researching can actually work in the real world. We need some kind of big breakthrough on this to create an actually useful quantum computer system. With all the cooling and shielding requirements we certainly won’t be using them at home any time soon.
But of course as with anything these days the marketing department and media runs with everything they can, spouting out nonsense about quantum computers becoming mainstream any day now and all the amazing things they can do. This can make it hard to figure out what the actual level of development is right now. Plus anybody working on this is putting in billions of dollars and sure as heck won’t share anything with anybody. So maybe someone has already made a breakthrough, but I doubt it.
barsoap@lemm.ee 6 months ago
And then there’s some people (me included) who bet a whole beer on quantum computers being inherently impossible. Not the “get them to calculate” part, but the “shave a factor off the asymptotics of computers using ordinary physics” part. The argument is simple: It could very well be that the more data you try to squeeze into a qbit, the fuzzier the result is going to get, so if you put ten million numbers each into two qbits and somehow make the qbits add them, you’ll get ten million results that are ten million times fuzzier than if you’d put in a single number. To the best of my knowledge I’ve not yet lost that bet, it has not been demonstrated that researchers won’t run against a wall, there, essentially that the universe has a limited computation capacity per volume of space (or however you measure things at that scale).
Other fun things to annoy people with: Claim that deciding between P = NP and P /= NP is undecidable.
AliasAKA@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I think in general the goal is not to stuff more information into fewer qubits, but to stabilize more qubits so you can hold more information. The problem is in the physics of stabilizing that many qubits for long enough to run a meaningful calculation.