That's a bit like saying we should make the tires better instead of improving the engine. They're distinct things. Why not improve both?

I agree in principle, but do not agree that merging memory and processing is like "making the tires better". If computation is the interaction of memory and processing, wouldnt combining the two be considering a pretty significant improvement to the engine? "making the tires better" is more like HPs Machine. Adding optical communication or memristor for memory. But merging the two leads to something wholly different.

Combining memory elements and processing elements is not going to give you exponential speedups at...simulating physical systems.

Actually i'm not sure I agree with the "physical system" assessment, particularly if said system comes from biology. It depends on the thing you are simulating. A simple example. I would love to continue this line of reasoning if you are interested.

The reason qc looks absurdly complicated and intractable right now is that we're still in the research and development stage. But papers like this show that progress is being made. There are planned paths from where we are now to running large quantum computers, and any step along the way turning out to be impossible would be a huge discovery in physics.

Understood. But I guess my question is the same as what I asked whitewhim above. Don't get me wrong--I am a huge fan of physics and computation and Feynman and all of it, but I have been hearing exactly the same arguments my entire adult life. Its starting to get old, and honestly when I look at nature I do not see a quntum computer: I see a massive thermodynamically self-organizing system with no distinction between memory and processing. So wouldn't a computer that is most efficient at simulating such a system be an equivalent system?

Thank you for participating in this discussion. I am in awe of pretty much all applications of physics and technology and I am only here to learn and hopefully make useful things.