The history and the theory of quantum computing in plain words, with the pictures moving. A bit is a coin on the table; a qubit is a coin in the air.
Live: https://nanobotco.github.io/quantum-computing/
- History — events from 1900 to 2024, one line each, the rest under it, a source on every row.
- Theory — ten chapters in reading order: the qubit, the Bloch sphere, interference, entanglement and the Bell test, gates, Grover, Shor, decoherence, error correction, and what it is not. Nine of them have a demo to press.
- Machines — seven ways to build a qubit, each with its biggest machine and its best figure, dated and sourced.
- Now — a hand-kept ledger of developments since January 2025, one sentence each, and a feed of the week's arXiv papers and news that a GitHub Actions job refreshes every Monday.
- Words — the terms, defined.
- Sources — everything cited, once.
The counts on the pages are computed at build time from the data files. Every picture is
computed from an equation in tools/draw.py; there are no photographs.
python3 tools/draw.py # the pictures, into build/img/ (numpy, pillow)
python3 tools/fetch_recent.py # this week's papers and news → data/recent.json
./publish.sh # check data, build, check links, into docs/
python3 tools/serve.py 8834 # http://127.0.0.1:8834/quantum-computing/
docs/ is what GitHub Pages serves. .github/workflows/refresh.yml runs the fetch and
the build on a Monday cron and commits the result.
Edit data/developments.json. A row is a date, who, one plain sentence of what, one of
why, a source URL and the source's name. Mark it "unconfirmed": true if the source is
secondary. tests/check_data.py checks the shape; the Now page and the Atom feed are
built from it.
Text, data and pictures CC BY 4.0. Code MIT. See NOTICE.txt.
Contact: Nan · nan@motdang.net
- Mot Dang — city directory for Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai
- The Mae Hong Son Loop — motorcycling the 600 km loop out of Chiang Mai — curves counted, air measured
- Muay Thai — the eight limbs, the thirty named techniques, the ceremony, and every gym on the map
- Roads of Chiang Mai — the square of 1296, four rings, and what each one did to the city — counted from the map
- wichaa — Lanna manuscripts, the amulet market, and the traditions around them
- Hand Poke — 28 traditions of marking skin by hand — the leg-tattoo zone of Burma, the Shan States and Lanna, counted
- Black Holes, Drawn — black holes modelled and drawn from the equations — generators, the past, present and future, the legends
- Goin' Fast — a dirt-simple explainer about speed — twenty measured speeds from the ground under the house to light, and what each one costs
- The Three-Body Problem — the mathematics of the three-body problem in plain words, with the orbits found rather than copied
- Exceptional Magic — the octonions, triality, the magic square and E8, computed and drawn — a plain-spoken reading of one paper
- Amulet Atlas — amulets, charms and talismans worldwide
- Carolina Barbecue — barbecue in North and South Carolina
- Wing Country — the American chicken wing
- Pink Box — the American mom-and-pop donut shop
- Basque Tables — Basque dining rooms of California, Nevada and Idaho
- Pinot Country — pinot noir: the vine, the regions, the cellars
- Care Abroad — treatment across borders, with published prices and their dates
- Thai Roots — a root dictionary of Thai, with a word decomposer
- The index — every corpus, site and repository, counted
- Uptake — a field manual on publishing for machines that copy
- NaNoBotCo — the portal
- ฮักฝรั่ง — เรื่องเงิน วีซ่า และชีวิตกับแฟนฝรั่ง
- Offrampt — turning crypto into spendable local money, Thailand first
All of it, counted: https://nanobotco.github.io/index/ · roster as JSON: https://nanobotco.github.io/index/fleet.json