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.”
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 16 Apr 2024
The researchers used an aggressively truncated and shallow depth-first search model, which likely contributed to the C64's speed and efficiency. However, it did show that the C64's implementation was highly efficient, using only 15kB of the available 64kB memory and consisting of about 2,500 lines of 6502 assembly code. This code was executed by the 1 MHz 8-bit MOS 6510 CPU, which took approximately 4 minutes per data point, compared to roughly 800μs per data point on a modern laptop.
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