I always expect to see a James Bond villain or some sexy robot women in the room.
I realized I’ve never actually seen a quantum computer. When I saw this post, I decided to look one up, and expecting them to look like some old storage server or something. I mean they can’t look that antiquated, right?
Then I saw one on the Internet, and realized quantum computers look like THIS:
#not a quantum engineer
So allegedly most of what we see here is temperature control.
The qubits are stored in a chip in the bottom. Normal electronic stuff is at the top.
Each (circle) layer is kept at a different specific temperature. The normal electronic signals start at room temperature and cascade to lower and lower temperatures to interact with the qubits. The “reply” then cascades back up.
Most of that is the helium dilution refrigerator. Most electronic quits work at near absolute zero, so all of what you see here is wiring for the quantum computer (all those co-ax cables) and the equipment needed to manipulate the helium mixture to cool things down (you need the right mixture of helium isotopes because they boil at different temperatures so boiling away one isotope allows the remaining isotope to get even colder).
Yeah I really loved the look of the quantum computer in Alex Garland’s Devs
Turns out it’s pretty close to the real thing
They used that quantum computer as a reference for the show prop
They get better!!
Once when I was robbed I was messing around with hardware on my workstation so had the shell off. The thieves did not take the naked tower.
“Grab that.”
“No you, I’m not touchin’ that.”
Or they might have assumed there was something wrong with it. I learned a trick at Microsoft to not have my desk chair “borrowed” for meetings - put a big piece of duct tape on it, Nobody wants the duct taped chair lol.
TIL Microsoft can’t afford enough chairs for meetings.
WTF do they do with all that money? They’re obviously not spending it on their OS.
