@roboneko@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@rees this is normal. most of computer science was figured out in the 60s and the microchip wouldn't become prevalent for another 20 years.
@icedquinn@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@rees ehh at least we knew that stuff was fundamentally in the realm of possibility. that is, even with vacuum tube tech it was obvious that scaling up was possible in a fundamental sense the same way it's obvious that I can always build a larger computing cluster today
last time I checked no one was actually sure how far it's physically possible to scale quantum chips up. as in not even knowing what the fundamental physical limits might be. altho I haven't really been following along for the past couple of years. do we have any non-toy examples of these chips yet?
@roboneko@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@rees google and some other company have working quantum computers. i think i saw you could buy tiny ones but they're not generally useful for most things right now.
@roboneko@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@rees i thought they were unhelpful because the algorithms are fucky. like the whole reading data destroys it from storage because that's just how quantum works.
> they're not generally useful for most things right now
yeah that's what I meant. I should have worded that more like, any idea what's the minimum (approximate) bit count to be useful (ie run at least one quantum algorithm in a manner applicable to some real world task that actually exists) and what's the highest bit count physically realized so far?
@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@rdr@icedquinn@rees whenever I learn about the history of scientific type stuff it always amazes me how far along humanity was for so long without knowing "how to fit it together" or however you would describe it. leaves me wondering just how little hardware might be required for something like AGI. was late 90s tech enough to construct a paper clip optimizer if someone had known how?
Gauss and d'Alembert were using what we call "Fourier Analysis" to study the heat equation, before Fourier came along. Gauss had discovered the FFT in 1805, before Fourier made any meaningful progress in the field.
@roboneko@icedquinn@rees More than that - we *had* turing machines. Jacquard looms existed even in the 1800s, and this was sufficient for the field to make sense as an object of study.