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Interestingly IBM have made LEGO sets of various mainframes. I believe that they have been giving them away as prizes and such, there is also a few other companies with LEGO sets listed on the page as well: https://domjant.hu/bricks/
Super cool! What a great page.
These are all just models of the cryostats and classical computer interfaces used to cool and read out from the quantum computing devices. These are not the quantum computing devices themselves.
(Before anyone starts. Yes, the read out is essential, but room temperature devices are coming to the forefront now so no the cryostat is not a compulsory part of the QC setup.)
I saw a tour take place at my facility whereby a man pointed at an empty cryostat and said "Wow, a quantum computer". None of us had the heart to tell him otherwise.
The cryostat is the most visually impressive part, to be fair.
That's the cool chandelier looking thing, for anyone reading. It's a multi-stage cooler and the actual computer mounts to the bottom. I think the reason it's upside-down is that the liquid phase of the refrigerant medium is the cold part, and gravity holds it where it needs to be. They could probably engineer one that works in any orientation but there's no reason to.
IBM’s Quantum System One was a marvel of design exploiting the cryostat in a mirrored container. An absolutely impressive piece of hardware.
As somebody involved in the design of quantum computers (specifically, the architecture of the circuitry on the microchip), you're technically correct. But you're also so wrong. The best lego model of a microchip is the piece #4211415.
The cryostat is the cool part (pun intended) that people want to build models of.
Builder Andrew Eylar built the Red Room of the IBM building on king street in Lego, which I thought was cool:
I guess these are the kind of updates we are getting on Quantum Computing these days ^^'
At least it's tangible progress :D
Shame there's no lego model with the dangly bits showing.
IBM has one for their newer quantum computers. It's not on this site though.
Sounds like a bikeshedding project of some QC researcher.
Rendering of LEGO models built with Claude [1], using LDrawLoader [2] (from three.js).
[1]: https://github.com/JanLahmann/Quantego/commits/main/assets/j...