Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ
&gt; <i>It’s like, if you believed that useful air travel was fundamentally impossible</i><p>Uh, there are birds. Literally everyone thought useful air travel was possible, and not only possible, but so easy that a Darwinian process was able to produce it, not once, but literally thousands of times, in thousands of ways.<p>----<p>But looking at the actual &quot;experiment&quot;, I don&#x27;t count that as computation in any meaningful sense, and morally equivalent to the following:<p>Set up a digital camera and point it at a scene. Take a picture. Now take millions of additional pictures, without moving the camera.<p>Measure the values at each pixel. See how they correspond to &quot;amplitudes&quot;? <i>That&#x27;s our computation.</i> &lt;= (This is the part of the article that should raise eyebrows...)<p>Article (smugly): How about you simulate (render) the scene using an actual computer? Measure the amplitudes of the resulting millions of images. <i>OMG, that took you so long!!! Loser.</i><p>Are we being punk&#x27;d here?<p>The digital camera is the quantum computer. The &quot;scene&quot; is the random initial state <i>C</i>. The scene is then translated into a renderable scene for the classical computing version, and rendered with an unbiased physically based renderer, which produces the same result.<p>I fail to see how any of this is even remotely exciting, much less interesting. A camera is not a computer, no matter how many measurements you make with it, nor how &quot;random&quot; the scene you are taking pictures of is.<p>And yes, simulating reality takes more cycles than just measuring whatever happened with a camera. Photos are &quot;faster&quot; to get than the equivalently rendered scene—news at 11!<p>Again: <i>Are we being punk&#x27;d here?</i>