Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I’ve been fascinated by computing since getting my first computer (an Atari 800 XL) way back in the Jurassic era. Studied computing in college (although I rapidly switched from a computer science major to CIS after peering at the barrage of upper level math classes I’d have to take) and have tried to keep up to date as part of my job and hobby ever since…but wow, quantum computing has been a tough one to wrap my head around.
I feel like I have enough of a classical computing and general science level of education to just barely see the fringes of quantum computing, and even then it will sometimes it will speed away, completely out of sight. I’ve read some articles, watched some in depth videos, and lately have been chatting with Gemini about it. I think I’m “getting it”, but really it still doesn’t click in the brain like good old “ones and zeros”.
Today, I fed the paper discussed on SN1034 into Gemini, just to have a chat about it. Gemini really picked up on the snark in the paper, which I thought was amusing, but it didn’t dismiss it. Although framed in a satirical way, the general ideas within it seem correct…at least in pointing out that the general claims about quantum computing tend to get overblown outside of the scientific research community.
Indeed, from what I’ve understood (about 0.05% of the whole), quantum computing is really a physics and engineering problem at the moment. Maybe the current level of quantum computing research is at the classical computing pre-vacuum tube stage (maybe even earlier). Perhaps researchers today are just now figuring out how their qubit “gears” can be manipulated to produce a very rudimentary adding machine. Albeit “gears” that may change their number of teeth depending upon if you observe them or not. 
Fun concepts, but something visual in the show notes would’ve been helpful…