Monday, August 19, 2019

Analog

Dave was really worried. the latest batch of SSD he'd received to put in the server farm was turning up way lower capacity than the last one. What was wrong? He zoomed some friends in friendly cloud providers, but found it hard to hear what they were saying. He ran some error diagnostics on the storage systems - weird, the bad blocks were all over the place, then the diagnostic tool crashed. He tried to reboot the SDN controller net and then tried a re-install. Nothing worked.

Luckily, he had an old AM radio tuned to a local rock classic station that played vinyl only. He tried to find a news station, but they all seemed to be down. so was all the internet. He went outside and got on his bike and cycled over to see some friends on stanford campus who have a clue. They were all hunched over a scope looking at the waves off of a probe.

"Hi Dave, look at this" they said pointing at the very wavy line on the old screen. "It looks like we can't see truth and falsity anymore" they quipped - indeed, it seemed as if the laws of physics had subtly altered so that electronics that distinguished "1" and "0" could no longer do so reliably.

"we're not in a binary world anymore, dave" said the trans in charge of the lab, semi-humourously.
"I wonder if this is because of those experiments Q was doing last week", suggested encrico.
"Q? the guy who's been pushing the bounds on eliminating de-coherence effects, probably" asked dave. "yeah, so we think that what her experiment actually does is to rapdily switch which universe we are all in so that the QC she's using is usually right. The problem is it now means that everything else is frequently wrong"

"Well that about wraps it up for computer science, doesn't it, surely?, asked dave.
"oh no - one quantum computer should be sufficient for everything we ever want to do again", quipped TJ. "so like Q - do or die". "no, god doesn't play die".


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