I was recently learning about Shors Algorithm which was kind of mind blowing until I found out it can’t actually be executed on anything right now. We’re still in the super early days. Like where microcomputers were 40-50 years ago
There's a trap in that sort of thinking. It assumes that it's inevitable that we will at some point arrive at current day for quantum computers. That technology is a straight path in whatever direction we set out. I don't think that is a given. There a plenty of things out there that physics just can't do. Things that, no matter how much effort and thought and research we put into it, we just can't make the world do in a scalable affordable fashion. I don't have the knowledge to make a believable claim that quantum computers are one of those, but you have to consider that it might be.
It's possible that quantum computers aren't at the stage of the 8086, but rather at the stage of the flying cars in jetsons. Doomed to forever be an unrealistic dream.
Progress only looks like a straight shot in hindsight. Yes, we can take any invention today and trace every step back to the previous to make a single unbroken chain to the invention of the wheel.
But for every airplane, there's a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT.
For scale: Babbage's planned analytical engine had a word size of 50 digits, a clock rate of 7Hz, and a physical size of roughly a locomotive [2]. Contrast [3] where it's estimated that 600-digit superposed additions would run at 27Hz (by dedicating millions of qubits to magic state distillation of the underlying AND gates). Given current plans, a quantum computer capable of doing arithmetic operations as wide and as fast as the analytical engine would probably be larger than the analytical engine.
We can see how to do reliable quantum computation in principle. The overhead of error correction makes it daunting in scale. It sure would be nice if someone came along and invented the quantum computing equivalent of a vacuum tube or a transistor.
[1]: https://csferrie.medium.com/quantum-computing-worst-case-sce...
[2]: https://medium.com/tech-is-a-tool/building-the-modern-comput...
[3] "How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits" https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/
It tells us nothing about reality.
Quantum computer with just 1123 qubits released this month. However, it doesn't work properly yet, because large systems doesn't work as quantum systems, so error rate is high. Large quantum computer is like Eniac at earthquake.