Me in high school computers class:
Hey Teach, I get how code logic flows, but if computers are just bunches of transistors and transistors are just switches, how does any of this actually run or work?
You know, I don’t actually know, I only ever learned coding…
* 3 years of electrical and computer engineering Later *
Huh, those are the most wildly complicated and impressive things ever built, thank god I finally got a grasp on it.
* 1 year of quantum and optical computing later *
quiet sobbing
Optical computing won’t change anything. The compiler takes care of it.
Even quantum computing basically works just like a GPU. You give it an algorithm and data to retrieve the result a bit later. Someone will make a quantum equivalent of CUDA before commercialization.
It doesn’t really matter, it’s not enough for me to just black box it and say the compiler will handle it, I want to have a rough idea of how every part of the stack works, otherwise I’m right back to high school.
The gate here is really cool, I remember from my optical classes all the different ways to encode bits on a photon over fiber, I am curious which properties are more and less suitable for this application.
Well, good luck. When I studied computer science 25 years ago, none of this was even a thing, lol. I think this is all amazaballs!
it could make our current computing technology exponentially more efficient, thus reducing the global power consumption of our data-driven society.
That’s a bold lie. Jevons paradox will apply and the first thing that will happen is building more AI data centers and crypto mining.