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'Qommodore 64' born from 2,500 lines of MOS 6502 assembly code.
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.”
At the beginning of the paper, the researchers admit that their ‘Qommodore 64’ project is “a joke,” but, sadly for IBM, its proof of quantum utility was also built upon shaky foundations, and the Qommodore 64 team came up with some convincing-looking benchmarks. There was some controversy about IBM’s claims at the time, and we are reminded it took just five days for the quantum experiment to be simulated on an ordinary MacBook M1 Pro laptop. The jokey Quantum Disadvantage paper (PDF link, headlining section starts at page 199) ports this experiment to a machine packing the far more humble MOS Technology 6510 processor.
To get deep into the weeds with the quantum theory and math behind the quantum utility experiment, please follow the above PDF link. However, to summarize, the C64-based experiment uses the sparse Pauli dynamics technique developed by Beguŝić, Hejazi, and Chan to approximate the behavior of ferromagnetic materials. Famously, IBM claimed such calculations were “too difficult to perform on a classical computer to an acceptable accuracy, using the leading approximation techniques,” recalls the paper. Not quite, and as already mentioned above, an ordinary laptop can obtain similar results.
www.tomshardware.com
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.”
At the beginning of the paper, the researchers admit that their ‘Qommodore 64’ project is “a joke,” but, sadly for IBM, its proof of quantum utility was also built upon shaky foundations, and the Qommodore 64 team came up with some convincing-looking benchmarks. There was some controversy about IBM’s claims at the time, and we are reminded it took just five days for the quantum experiment to be simulated on an ordinary MacBook M1 Pro laptop. The jokey Quantum Disadvantage paper (PDF link, headlining section starts at page 199) ports this experiment to a machine packing the far more humble MOS Technology 6510 processor.
To get deep into the weeds with the quantum theory and math behind the quantum utility experiment, please follow the above PDF link. However, to summarize, the C64-based experiment uses the sparse Pauli dynamics technique developed by Beguŝić, Hejazi, and Chan to approximate the behavior of ferromagnetic materials. Famously, IBM claimed such calculations were “too difficult to perform on a classical computer to an acceptable accuracy, using the leading approximation techniques,” recalls the paper. Not quite, and as already mentioned above, an ordinary laptop can obtain similar results.
Commodore 64 claimed to outperform IBM's quantum system — sarcastic researchers say 1 MHz computer is faster, more efficient, and decently accurate
'Qommodore 64' born from 2,500 lines of MOS 6502 assembly code.
