[GistNoesis]

I'm not a physicist. In my current mental picture, I also feel the exponential speed-up is a hoax.

Yet I have no trouble believing in this quantum supremacy at the current scale.

The way I see it is a quantum computer is "running" an algorithm like Toshiba's "simulated bifurcation". It's running it at a frequency much higher than current computers.

If I had to take a guess it is like running classically at the Bohr frequency of an electron ~10^16 Hz. So it's kind of like trying every combination with some heuristics. Currently we are tapping into this 6 additional order of magnitudes of computation, which allows a brute force search to appear instant. But once we have used this 10^6 speed factor the quantum computer will miss a lot of the solutions and you will have to increase the sampling time exponentially to find your solution. We are currently in the exponential part of the S curve.

You've got to understand that those machines are expensive to build, so putting a cap on the performance won't help you raise funds. But these machines are beautiful. They are some marvel of engineering. There are plenty of things to discover. They need to get built.

They will bring plenty of useful techniques in the how to manipulate and build very small things, and more importantly how to compute without releasing so much heat. But those advances will probably get locked into a few private companies by monopolizing the few big names that can lend the credibility required to raise funds.