I'm a big proponent of writing about technological innovations on the PC Gamer site. I know you all like a little science, and I'm always desperate to share new discoveries so that my fellow PC gamers can get excited about human evolution. So when Imam Khomeini University of Marine Science and Technology (RA) announced the so-called "first product of quantum processing algorithms," of course I was excited. [But it didn't take long for that claim to fall apart.

In the presence of Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayari of Iran, the Coordinating Vice Minister of the Army of the Islamic Republic (and former Commander of the Navy), the university unveiled an impressive-looking "quantum processor." The board in question was only a few inches on a side and had a brilliant radial circuit pattern, but looked a little too rudimentary to be capable of quantum processing power on its own.

If your gut had told you the same thing, it would have been correct. Shortly after this announcement was made, Gabriel Noronha, former advisor to the U.S. State Department on Iran, discovered that this "quantum processor" was actually a widely available development board.

"You too can get this 'quantum processor' for as low as $589 on Amazon," he explains, including a screenshot of the Amazon page.

That board turns out to be the ZedBoard Zynq-7000 development SoC; imagine flipping quantum bits with just 256GB of storage, 512MB of DDR3 RAM, and a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor.

One sales site lists "video processing, motor control, software acceleration, Linux/Android/RTOS development, embedded ARM processing, and general Zynq-7000 AP SoC prototyping" as potential uses for this board. The Iranian news agency Tasnim explained that "we need to focus on emerging breakthrough technologies to address future threats" (machine translation). It also notes its use "to address the deception of positioning systems on surface vessels using algorithms."

I can now see them nodding and gesturing, inflecting the word "algorithm" tightly and squinting with serious eyes.

As Vice points out, this is not the first time Iran has attempted a breakthrough; Iran's recent claim to have developed the COVID-19 detector turned out to be a sham, as it was sold as part of a scam known throughout the Middle East.