A paper released during the SIGBOVIK 2024 conference details an attempt to simulate the IBM ‘quantum utility’ experiment on a Commodore 64. The idea might seem preposterous – pitting a 40-year-old home computer against a device powered by 127-Qubit ‘Eagle’ quantum processing unit (QPU). However, the anonymous researcher(s) conclude that the ‘Qommodore 64’ performed faster, and more efficiently, than IBM’s pride-and-joy, while being “decently accurate on this problem.”
Well, yeah. The article goes into detail how they did it using under 64K of memory.
Unfortunately, it’s only hobbyists and, presumably, super low-end embedded device programmers, maybe, who continue to squeeze the maximum out of their code.
Everyone else in 2024 is just scaffolding stuff up with thousands of dependencies and hundreds of MB of code they never look at or seek to understand.
Oh, and as a reminder, I have at least five Commodore 64s. And after that enumeration in 2005, I added Triticale’s Commodore 128. The turn of the 21st century proved to be a high water mark for finding those old computer systems in the wild as people emptied their closets of fifteen and twenty year old technology. Since we moved to Nogglestead, I’ve only bought a pair of TI 99s at a church garage sale. You don’t even see them, really, at antique malls, although I have seen a TRS-80 at Relics.
Maybe I really do have all of them now.
(Link via Tech Shepherd.)
