Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

A Working Quantum Computer in 3 Years?

Posted by timothy on from the not-with-my-quanta-you-don't dept.

prostoalex writes "Vancouver, BC-based D-Wave Systems got $17.5 mln from Draper Fisher Jurvetson to work on a preliminary version of a quantum computer, Technology Review reports. Delivery date? Within three years: 'It won't be a fully functional quantum computer of the sort long envisioned; but D-Wave is on track to produce a special-purpose, "noisy" piece of quantum hardware that could solve many of the physical-simulation problems that stump today's computers, says David Meyer, a mathematician working on quantum algorithms at the University of California, San Diego.'"

3 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. Re:got my hopes up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    but it's not a proper quantum computer. It's based on tunneling, not entanglement.

    Nope, it is a quantum computer qubit. E.g. Google for "Cooper pair boxes"

    This is a solid state quantum computer, an artifical atom, where the state could be encoded as the presence or absence of charge on an island. It tunnels on and off quantum mechanically, creating a qubit. Its just how the underlying system works.

    Entanglement requires the coupling of more than one qubit, and is more part of the maths of QM. However, this may be done practically through capacitve or inductive coupling for the above devices.

  2. What's the big deal? by jpmorgan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    People have been building quantum computers for years now. The biggest ones these days (around 14-qubits) are NMR quantum computers, although that technique appears to have scalability issues.

    Seems to me that this is only news since they plan on selling quantum-CPU time.

  3. Solve the travelling salesmen problem in seconds? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It will, however, be ideally suited to solving problems like the infamous traveling-salesman problem . . . D-Wave's chip performs exactly this type of calculation automatically, in seconds.

    How many seconds?
    Are they claiming that the travelling salesmen problem can be solved in polynomial time? This would be the biggest news to come out of the computer industry since the invention of the transistor. As far as I know, no quantum algorithms exist for solving NP complete problems such as the travelling salesmen problem. Can anyone here enlighten me?