Ridiculously Fast Supercomputer
Let's say that somehow, Earth suddenly acquired a computer with ridiculous speed. This computer can run a program described in a language of your choice, which can be described by a readme file that comes with the device. This device can have the capability to generate true random numbers, and run any program instantly (or nearly instantly, like 1 nanosecond, this does not matter because the input and output is bounded by USB protocol speed).
What would be the implications of said device, and what would it be used for? I imagine some extreme Monte Carlo simulations could be run on it, and many other things, but how would that impact society in the near future?
You cannot take apart or examine the machine in any way, it is a mysterious cubic meter of handwavium with a USB port where you drop in a file like input.txt and then pull out a file output.txt with normal USB protocol. (Yes this is sort of a limit on program size, but hey its an instant computer, what more can you expect?)
This cube computer can be plugged into one of our computers via USB, and it looks just like a USB flash drive to the computer. But as soon as you drop in a file named input.txt it will be read, deleted and an output.txt will be created or overwritten. It does not need a power supply either.
The program cannot be used to gather information about the architecture, system, or inner workings of the computer. This is not an actual computer with conventional circuits, and it is not bounded by the speed of light etc.
If this device is unique and it is found by, say, NASA, what advances would we see in the near future?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18578. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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