qc

A six-panel SMBC comic. A man and a woman talk. He asks who she thinks the greatest engineers are; she answers "Quantum computer architects." When he asks why, she says the motivating spirit of engineers is building things, then declares "WRONG." She explains the deep abiding goal of every engineer is to take a thing and make it do something it wasn't supposed to do. Gesturing emphatically, she lists venerated engineering feats: getting DOOM to run on a washing machine, modifying a phone to detect radiation, and notes a digital computer is just the guts of a cash register rearranged into logic gates. She continues that quantum computer geeks are "running scripts on God's own hardware," seizing on the fundamental nature of reality just to hack email. In the final panel the man, now enthused, says "We could run DOOM... on the universe," and she replies "AMEN!" Votey: A small panel showing a planet or coin-like sphere floating in a void over clouds, with a disembodied voice from above saying "Shoot, this universe is compromised. Flush." — implying our universe is being deleted like a hacked machine.