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Quantum Computer Demoed, Plays Sudoku
prostoalex writes "Canadian company D-Wave Systems is getting some technology press buzz after successfully demonstrating their quantum computer (discussed here earlier) that the company plans to rent out. Scientific American has a more technical description of how the quantum computer works, as well as possible areas of application: 'The quantum computer was given three problems to solve: searching for molecular structures that match a target molecule, creating a complicated seating plan, and filling in Sudoku puzzles.' Another attendee provides some videos from the demo." Anyone want to guess how long before "qubit" gets compressed to "quit" (as "bigit" became "bit" in the last century)?
Does this mean we'll be able to solve the Traveling Salesman problem soon? That would lead to a revolution in efficiency of everything from travel to mass transit to shipping.
I imagine the USPS and other shipping organizations will be the first to buy commercial versions of these.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
"Anyone want to guess how long before "qubit" gets compressed to "quit" (as "bigit" became "bit" in the last century)?"
4 271_s.jpg
Nope.
http://myspace-271.vo.llnwd.net/00407/17/24/40728
Anyone want to guess how long before "qubit" gets compressed to "quit"
Actually, people "quit" "Q-Be(r)t" a decade ago. Hmm.. quantum machanics is funny that way.
(as "bigit" became "bit" in the last century)?
No, bigots still (unfortunately) play a very large role.
Have you read my journal today?
Never heard of one (bigit). I have, however, heard of the "binary digit" that was shortened to "bit". Given that history, "qubit" is short for "quantum binary digit" - which is an oxymoron since quantum digits can be any (or all) of several states, not just on or off (binary). A more accurate acronymish shortening would be "quigit" - which sounds awkward enough to be shortened to "qit", (pronounced KIT rather than QUIT to avoid confusion).
I think "qubit" is here to stay, though.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these running Linux!
My suggestion for new tasks: Serve videos linked from the slashdot frontpage, serve videos linked from the slashdot frontpage and serve videos linked from the slashdot frontpage.
Does it run Linux? In all seriousness, I'd like to see how quickly this thing could brute force SHA256 from a 65,000 word dictionary file.
Actually you don't need the DFS.
I've built a Sudoku program to help me reduce the boring parts (filling in the only posssible option if it is known). I didn't know that it would solve all boards except for the hardest ones.
Then I've added another filter that still was not DFS and it solved all boards to this day except 2. One of which had 2 solutions and the second could be solved with a DFS of depth 1.
Took all the fun out of the game.
Some timing statistics: less than 1 second with Javascript on Firefox. About 30 seconds with Internet Explorer.
Anyone want to guess how long before "qubit" gets compressed to "quit" (as "bigit" became "bit" in the last century)?
I got dibs on "forever"
I'm actually curious - for how long do the 16 qubits stay coherent? You can only do quantum computations while the qubits remain coherent. Furthermore, IIRC coherence times where (at best) in the range of a few microseconds.
The Raven
Is this a true quantum computer, or one that simply uses certain quantum properties? Scientists weren't predicting this for another 20-30 years. Wouldn't a 1024 qubit computer be far faster than any cluser on earth? And if I'm not mistaken, a 16 qubit computer would be faster than any single computer. I'd like to see some speed comparisons for parallel tasks.
I didn't know that it would solve all boards except for the hardest ones.
I've written one using DFS, it will solve all puzzles that have a solution. It stops when it reaches one solution. Having an application that can solve most, but not all puzzles isn't much help.
Took all the fun out of the game.
I never thought it was fun to begin with.
I want to solve sudoku. Now some computer can do it so fast that it's finished before they even start? What good is that? Sudoku is supposed to be about wasting time, not reversing it.
...somewhere in the universe there is a computer just like it
... Faster Than Light Quantum Tunneling Disinformation .. like this post.
unsolving the Sodoku puzzle at the exact same time.
FTLQTDC
IANAQP, but isn't Sudoku (the general case, not the trivial 9x9 sized problems that humans usually solve) NP-complete, and it is known that quantum computers cannot efficiently solve NP-complete problems, but only slightly "easier" ones like integer factorization, which are in a complexity class called BQP?
I know this is just a small proof of concept, but why not attempt to solve a problem that QC is actually useful for?
Anyone want to guess how long before hillbillies start asking "How many quberts you got in that there system?"
I come to warn you that there shall be a great outage.. go forth and build an array to save my creations. Make it 100 qubits long, 30 qubits wide, and 10 qubits deep. Into this hash all data in /usr/god/dataM/ .. and /usr/god/dataF/
Do this, and you shall survive the outage I shall send.
:D I can't resist a bad pun.
-GiH
I've built a Sudoku program to help me reduce the boring parts (filling in the only posssible option if it is known)
Wait, those are the boring parts??
Took all the fun out of the game.
I told you!
Sounds like a game played on flying broomsticks...
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The Political Programmer
Correctly done, Sudoku puzzles have only one solution -- perhaps I'm missing something in your statement?
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
I wonder....
If the NSA wanted to build a custom quantum computer to break traditional cryptographic systems what are the chances that's it's already been done (and in use)?
Mass producing a commercially viable quantum computer (or many sci-fi like technologies) is usually pretty hard, but producing one or two special purpose built systems are MUCH easier.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Big deal, I can do that already by myself.
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
BIGIT became BIT, but QUBIT won't become QUIT... it most likely will become QUT (pronounced CUTE)...
--E--
And to avoid the massive worldwide suicide of voice-recognition software who suddenly log-out the computer, in the mid of the dictation of some research paper...
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I wrote one using excel.
my wife thought I was insane, I learned a lot more about excel though.
I got it to two tier away solutions- if this can't be a 5, that must be a 7.
but never a third.. my head exploded just following the examples I saw on line of three dependencies to determine one number...
and trying to calculate how to account for that, other than brute force checking.....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Immediately after booting, the Quantum Computer disappeared in a flash of light and noise. It resurfaced in 1985, where it briefly took over a Commodore 64 and corrected some mistakes it made the first time around, before moving onto a UNIVAC in 1955...
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Depending on how many initial numbers are given at the start of the puzzle, multiple solutions to a specific initial set of numbers could exist.
Those puzzles are generally considered "broken" - but you can obtain a valid solution from those puzzles.
As an example of what I mean, consider the following puzzle grid - in the upper left corner, the digit is 1, in the far lower right hand corner, the number is 9 - multiple solutions exist that have a 1 in the (1,1) position and a 9 in the (9,9) position, and a complete solver should account for that. My application does not - it finds the first solution that meets that criteria.
Having an application that can solve most, but not all puzzles isn't much help.
I disagree. Such a program will allow the human to focus on the interesting boards, identify new patterns, etc. I never wrote it to solve the boards, I was actually amazed that it did.
Besides, what are you trying to prove? That you can write a Sudoku solver better than me? You won technically, as I never wrote a sudoku solver and you did.
Let's get to the point: Demonstrating a 16-quit computer on the Sudoku "optimization" task is only useful for show-off reasons, it is not technically needed. I'm quite sure a 10-year-old TI calculator can do the job cheaper.
I'm going to argue that "qubit" will most likely never be shorted, and certainly not to "quit."
One often over-looked factor in the shortening of words (because its completely subjective and unquantifiable) is whether or not the original word was cooler sounding and rolled off the tongue or not. "Bigit" just doesn't. "Qubit" is better. Both are two syllable words, so brevity isn't as much a factor, for English speakers at least, as it is for other shortened words like "auto." Ultimately, the relative awkwardness of saying the long version would be a greater factor.
However, I think the biggest factor stopping the use of "quit" is that it's semantically confusing. Using the word "bit" for a binary digit meshes well with an existing meaning -- a small piece or fragment. Even without knowing the etymology of "bit," a new reader to the subject material quickly absorbs its meaning because of this. Using "quit" for quantum bit does not really mesh with existing meanings and would only add confusion to new readers. I don't think it'll catch on for that reason.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Obviously that second sqrt() shouldn't be there, apologies (my original post is correct).
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_digit
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Some more videos...
High level explanation
Protein matching
Sudoku
Also, here's some slightly older talk at Stanford with a higher-level audience
Additionally, it's not exactly a "true quantum computer"(tm) - but it utilizes quantum mechanics as a quantum computer would. So it quacks like a duck, etc.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Geordie Rose's blog: http://dwave.wordpress.com/
Correctly DESIGNED Sudoku puzzles have only one solution. It's possible to make a puzzle that is ambiguous by removing too many numbers, or just the wrong number, from a puzzle.
Lord, what's a Qubit?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
They're not Sudoku.
But of course they have solutions. Otherwise, you couldn't start with an empty 9x9 grid and create a Sudoku in it in the first place.
In any case, solving the things is a much more trivial problem than creating valid ones or arbitrary difficulty. But the fact that seemingly hundreds of different publishers are out there creating books without any quantum computers at all is probably a good hint that nothing to do with Sudoku is a particularly impressive computational task to use to show how great your new quantum computer is.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
This would all be true for a Quantum Computer based on Binary, but this is an "Analog" computer. Back in the 40's and 50's Analog computers could run rings around digital computers in their domains, but they where only approximations, but for plotting flight plans and trajectories a few digits of precision where often enough.
I'm guessing similarly this machine might quickly calculate solutions to things like Traveling Sales Man problem and other NP complete problems, but not be guaranteed to have found the optimal solution, just a very, very, very good one quickly.
Letter To Iran
I wrote a perl program that will solve Sudoku programs and it doesn't need a quantum computer. Perhaps, can we demo something that requires a bit more processing power?
Since I'm not very familiar with the things you mentioned there, I'll ask: how better would the analog QC solutions be, compared to the current approximation algorithms for NP-complete problems? References/links welcome :)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Who's going to be the first to add "bigit" to Wikipedia? It should say something like: "Term first coined on /. in order to be re-abbreviated as 'bit'. Used to make example of how 'qubit' might one day be called 'quit'. Bigit should rhyme with digit so as to not be confused with bigot."
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
From what I understand, when you run Windows on a quantum computer it won't crash unless you look at it.
Also, the last time I used a machine with qubits, I had a hard time keeping them from jumping off the friggin' pyramid.
You've been great... I'm here all week... remember to tip your waiter.
> Quantum Computer Demoed, Plays Sudoku
Meh. I'll believe it when I'm simulated by it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This is different from ternary logic in that if you take N qubits, you get 2^N combinations to which the computation will be applied simultaneously, while if you had N ternary digits, you would have a fixed single state for each digit, even if it was 3 states instead of just 2 states as with bits.
The hard part about making qubits work is to keep them shielded from random outside influence while all of them stay qubits not bits. It is so hard that I wonder whether the company mentioned isnt selling vapourware.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
One problem with a demo of this sort is that it isn't possible to know how much was actually done by the quantum computer and how much was done by the classical front end computer. Typical Sudoku puzzles can be solved essentially instantaneously by classical computers. 16 qubits isn't a heck of a lot of quantum parellelism, so I do wonder how much of the real work they were doing.
No one to date has proved that P = NP.
We like TLA's!
It will be pronounced kit (no U sound) same as bit.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"Anyone want to guess how long before "qubit" gets compressed to "quit" (as "bigit" became "bit" in the last century)?"
...at least in my universe.
If it was shortened, I'd put my money on it being shortened to qbit, and then qit ("kit").
No sig.
GP is a compulsive Slinky straightener.
Let's take prime factorisation (two prime numbers multiply together to get a product), it's hard for classical computers to do. The simlest algorithm is to divide by every prime up to the root of the product until you get another prime out the other end. The simplest way to speed up that is to use more/faster processors. Oh and you also probably have to work out as you go along which numbers are prime and which are not.
That's a lot of number crunching. using a "true" quantumn computer you could set up a multiplication in the first instance by placing three strips of qbits alongside each other and wiring them up so that C = A * B. by locking A and B down C will happen by itself - because that's the only stable state of the system.
The beauty now is that you can do the reverse, lock C down and A and B will happen by themselves, because 1. division is the opposite of multiplication 2. you built the system to only handle integers 3. there is ONLY one factorisation of C when A and B are prime*
I've been wandering if such a setup would be possible using true analog computing: by setting up a bunch of rotating magnets that use North=1 and South=0 wired up for the multiplication. but it'd be a bitch to build even for trivial numbers of digits as binary multiplication involves a lot of carries and shifts, addition and subtraction on the other hand would probably be relatively easy but you'd still soon run out of technic lego
* actually there are three possible outcomes if you include A=1 and B=C and the reverse, the quantumn computer need not know the language/definition related argument of "is 1 prime" it's just an integer calculator.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
More guessing here, but for a 16 qubit machine I'm guessing not much.
Also I don't think qubit is the right word any more because it sounds like each of the 16 qubits in this machine is really a whole value like a byte or a word, else it wouldn't be "analog"
Perhaps this thing will rock at some application that needs thousands or millions of NP-complete approximations per second to be practical. Maybe it can efficiently simulate neural networks. Maybe it can speed voice or vision recognition or assist other areas of AI. Of course this is all just conjecture. I think it will be of little value in one off NP-complete type problems, but they specifically mention it being essentially a co-processor, which leads me to believe it is expecting to be blasted with lots of sub problems to be solved quickly.
Letter To Iran
Me, I'm lobbying for "qute".
Likewise. It's just a purely mechanical process - grind it out till it's all filled in. I don't find it satisfying in the least. Give me a good cryptic crossword any day - I put the popularity of sudoku down to the fact that, unlike crosswords, you don't actually need to know anything to be able to do one.
I could play sudoku on my 8088...
Where I say "asymmetric" I meant "symmetric" and vice versa, apologies.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
I have mod points today, and I was going to mod you down for being horribly, horribly misinformed and outright wrong, but I decided to reply instead.
You're horribly, horribly misinformed and outright wrong. Check out Shor's Algoirthm. There's a lot of crazy stuff in it, most of which has nothing to do with forcing a quantum system into its "only stable state."
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
"qit", (pronounced KIT
I don't think so, Michael.
Should take quyte a while, I think.
CBC just posted an article questioning the authenticity of D-Wave's claims because there hasn't been any peer review done.
"Martin [owner] said his company believes its computer is performing quantum computations, but confessed they're not certain."
and...
"In the face of the questions, D-Wave CEO Herb Martin said his company's device is not a true quantum computer but rather a specialized machine that uses quantum mechanics to perform its calculations."
I think we should wait out on this one, folks.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Perhaps you should have used what we like to call a "programming language" to write what would be a fairly complicated "program"...
True, but crosswords always annoy me - half of what you need to know is useless trivia: "Rebel Without a Cause Co-Star"... who cares? Okay, yeah, I know it's Natalie Wood, but that's useless knowledge.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
My server can't handle the traffic, but the videos are posted on Google Video:
D-Wave video part 1
D-Wave video part 2
We used to say "All hardware sucks."
Now we can say "Hardware still sucks, but now it sucks in multiple universes simultaneously!"
Technology marches ever onward.
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
D-Wave's computer maintains coherence for a handful of nanoseconds. They've got a long way to go before reaching microseconds.
Their technology is also significantly slower than conventional PCs solving the same problem. While an impressive proof of concept, their quantum computer is a long way from usability.
I would call it a 'qit' personally pronounced like 'kit'. But what do I know? I'm just lazy.
Ridiculous. Where would we be if everyone used "programming languages" to write programs.
and lots of smoke is there, too.
Milk and water: take something which is new, but not be interesting scientifically, mix it with something old and dilute it. Shake it for some time. Smoke: Add nice words and senseless technological complications. Claim that your system (although you are doing basic reseacrh which could not be more of from implmenting that) will solve the problems of the world put in your own hand to choose the problem size you want to do this with (If you write for IEEE on Image Processing wou will also not choose a picture where your algorithm fails). Smoke is necessary if you want to use milk and water and cover up that the things you are mixing with are not very new.
Disclaimer: I come from the field. Before I come to my critics, I have to say that I am impressed with DWave having this System developed in this way and I believe that something will come out, probably good research; and maybe eve a working QC.
Regarding the talk of Dr. Geordie Rose:
* he says, they have something but they do not want to compare it to the other approaches, which this time he at least gives an credit, claiming that the others try it differently. This is done to guide the audience away from topic of coherent entangement. I really miss an simple spectrocsopic measurement of their system or some of the things you can do in AQC.
* And, please. As far as I understand the 128 Control lines are used for DC biasing of the coupling SQUIDS. I'd like to see a calculation of the influence of the 1/f noise of the Spectrum of the Hamiltonian for a realistic algorithm.
* He claims that building a complex system out of things you don't understand and enhancing it is more promising than enhancing the single thing and composing it. He says they qould use a quick and dirty approach to it. He misses to mention that they are the only ones seriously doing so. (a fundamental issue about insulator materials used was found out, exactly because one of the leading groups examined a single qubit very careful)
* He brings it into a subtle connection to a technology long existing (RSFQ, which is not used as far as i can see on DWaves chip and Dwave has not much to do with this technology - only that some people working previously on RSFQ now work there) and presents it as something where their research is useful for. This is done deliberatly to stun the audience who most likely have not heard of it. He says that superconductting computers are fast, but indeed the AQC itself is slow. How slow, depends on the algorithm which you use.
* I would classify DWave as a hardware-company. Why all this glittering software around. For the people who want to use an QC it does not matter if you pack it nicely into an SQL server. Call me conservative and square, but somebody showing animations in a technological demonstration frontend has in 50% of the cases something to cover up.
I understand that all this is necessary to impress possible investors. As a scientist I'd be more impressed about a cond-mat preprint where DWave describes the performance of the system in detail. Actually I can't expect it...
...is "qbit" or even "qit" since "quit" is already a common word.
harr... quit yer frickin bickering 'bout qubits you dim-witted twits
Does it play DooM?
Physorg.com has an article with a different slant on this company. http://www.physorg.com/news90693138.html/
For anyone else who's confused as I am about quantum computing, here's a detailed Wikipedia entry. Now I'm even more confused than I was in the first place. :-\
Here is my home page.
Read http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/02/15/quantum.c omputer.ap/
FTFA: D-Wave Chief Executive Herb Martin emphasized that the machine is not a true quantum computer and is instead a kind of special-purpose machine that uses some quantum mechanics to solve problems. "Users don't care about quantum computing -- users care about application acceleration. That's our thrust," he said. "A general purpose quantum computer is a waste of time. You could spend hundreds of billions of dollars on it" and not create a working computer.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Was that Beryl/Compiz and a Gnome autohide toolbar in the first video? The 3D cube desktop rotate was certainly Compiz-esque.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Now we have a computer to write Soduku puzzles, and a computer to solve them. We can get back to our lives and reclaim our leisure time.
... YES!
Paul B.
P.S. This should also put to rest the "Does it play well with Linux?" thread...
"He said all the evidence the company has indicates that the device is performing quantum computations, but he acknowledged there is some uncertainty."
what more proof do you need? even the CEO has no idea what's going on, sounds like true quantum computing to me...
"after 5 years and a billion dollars we've finally made a quantum computer!"
"really?"
"I don't know, just don't look at it."
I don't care, as long as it runs Qbert.
... and then they built the supercollider.
For P = 0 or N = 1.
I know how to program.. amittedly mostly versions of basic, but I can follow the gist of quite a bit otherwise. //e, to keep track of a football pool for my phys ed teacher. )
( first program I ever wrote for money was in highschool, on a
the fact is- finding a way to consider open dependencies three deep, on a 81 square grid, is a lot.
Round one of solving a soduko- find any numbers that can't possibly go anywhere else- this was easy
i.e.- the six must go here
round two- compare all possible #'s remaining, and see if a specific choice makes the puzzle insoluble for other #'s
either of two squares can be a five- but if you make candidate 1 a five, you won't be able to place a 7
round three,- do #2 cubed, two generatins of dependecies.
if you have 40 boxes left, and have to look at all possible moves two or three layers deep, you may as well brute force it.
attempt all possible remaining answers (quantum computing method no?) and find the only one that works.... I wanted elegant, not brute force.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Isn't there a chance that it could kill every cat in the neighborhood?
This is an example of using the wrong tool for the job.
You should have written it as a Word macro.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
No. No. No. Try these steps in increasing order of difficulty:
Step 1) Find the numbers that can only go in one square.
Step 2) Find the squares where only one number can go (not exactly the same set)
Step 3) Find a pair of squares in the same row, column or group where only two numbers can go and eliminate these choices from the rest of the squares in the row, column or group
Step 4) Feed puzzle to dog.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Slow for big problems?
n tum/
;)e _power_of_quantum_computers
That's a binary system & it would depend on whether or not you want a 100% probable answer.
An (n) qubit processor can handle an (n) problem (using Shor's algorithm) to 100% probability, not just provide a solution to a high degree of probability. Qubits less than (n) require more runs to produce the correct solution, but will produce the 100% probable answer by deduction from (improving upon each of) the earlier (not 100% probable) solutions, until 100% is achieved, rather than (for the TSP) checking all the possibilities to find the best (shortest) one, as you would with a binary system. Keep on upping the qubits & the big problems become not so big & slow, after all. This requires an exponential increase in performance of binary hardware - not so on quantum hardware.
The Reg article from the other day...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/13/dwave_qua
[I'm going to use qb & QPU as abbreviations.]
An n=2^128 (128-bit) problem solved to 100% probability should require the following hardware for a relatively quick, 100% probable solution: 2^128 (a number with 30 zeroes) transistor CPU = a ((2x128)+1) 257qb QPU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#Th
n.b. The Core 2 Quad 'only' has 582million (a number with six zeroes after it) transistors (multiply the entire number by something like a mere twenty for the 80-core), which makes it look pretty feeble versus the D-Wave offering, for quantum-specific applications. If a 17qb QPU can crack an 8-bit encryption, with 100% probability, then it's good to go & is quantum. The problem, as pointed out in the Register article, is decoherence when upping the qubits.
An (n) qubit processor... should read a (2n+1) qubit processor.
If this is what they are up to, then it's really questionable if this is marketable quantum computer. According to my understaning (and of course a /.-er can correct me if I'm wrong) is an AQC is a way to solve those combinatorial problems that can be converted to be like annealing (in quantum terms, the lowest energy state of a Hamiltonian system).
Basically you find a system that's similar to the system (the hamitonian) you want to solve and put it in the "ground" state. Then you change system to be the system that you want to solve, but don't know the answer to. The part that usually runs on the regular comptuer is the "find the similar system" part.
With annealing, there is a "temperature" reduction component that needs to start out high enough so that the system can wiggle out of local minima in the answer of the similar system to the global minimum of the desired system.
In a AQC, presumably the system can "tunnel" to the final answer w/o having to have a high enough temperature so that some states can wiggle out of local minium. This presumably allows the states to evolve more directly to the global minimum in an AQC than an annealing machine, so theoretically, and AQC is faster than an annealing machine.
However, from what I can tell, the AQC is unknown to be scalable (e.g., it may not turn out to be any better than a regular computer) for any realistic problem problem size. Also if you design a very small AQC, it's hard to know if your device is really tunnelling or not (since it's hard to measure temperature and duration for a small system) so it may just be an annealing computer and there's not actually any tunnelling. This is why those D-wave guys seem to be hedging on this...
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
There is already a P partial solution to the travelling salesman. It does not find the best path, but it is proven that it finds at worst a path that's twice as long.
With a few heuristics, the worst case becomes very rare, and it usually finds something closer to the best solution.
So if we solve the NP travelling salesman in a perfect way, at most we'll get paths that are half the length.
That could be an improvement, but not a revolution.
I was hoping to see the quantum computer in that demo but I guess they can't show it to you..
If you look at it, it will collapse to its real form as the Amiga1000!
You're right, and I forgot about that, thanks for reminding me.
However, his original wording was "everything from travel to mass transit to shipping", so the triangular relationship holds for my statement.
No, no. A true Sith Master would write an ActiveX control using ATL and script it from Visual Basic for Applications. It's cross platform you see, it can run from Word AND Excel.
I have to admit, I kind of like ATL. Writing controls that can be used from VBA is an exercise in masochism though.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I don't know what to make of the Vanocuver show. It started late, it was overbooked, the seats if you were lucky enough to get one were uncomfortable. The registration system at the presentation was something out of high school. There were no freaking handouts! That was pathetic. There were no really good pictures of the assembled machine.
They told a real humdinger about attendance. They said they only expected 150 folks in total to show up in California and Vancouver. What a crock! They were taking on-line registrations. They knew how many were registering. Why were they too cheap to print off enough brouchures and handouts for the attendees?
The best line of the evening was, "The right answer comes up the majority of the time." That was just plain bad. Can you imagine Intel or AMD saying that at a product launch? 30 million dollars and it comes up with the right answer the majority of the time? Go home little boys and come back when you have a machine that comes up with the right answer all of the time.
Sudoku is NP-Complete (with the grid size being the variable) so if your new computer could handle it in polynomial time that would be quite impressive indeed.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
From an article on CNN this am, titled "Scientists dubious of quantum computer claims" -
D-Wave Chief Executive Herb Martin said all the evidence the company has indicates that the device is performing quantum computations, but he acknowledged there is some uncertainty.
Well, duh....