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Scientists Dubious of Quantum Computing Claims
Dollaz wrote with a link to the International Business Times, which questions the authenticity of D-Wave's Quantum computing. We discussed the 'Sudoku playing' computer yesterday, but scientists in the field have expressed a lot of distrust of the company's findings. The machine was not available for inspection during or after the demo, and even if the technology was working as intended there is some doubt that it can be scaled. The article points out that "notwithstanding lofty claims in the company's press release about creating the world's first commercial quantum computer, 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." Good to see people in the field questioning 'breakthroughs'.
I went to the Vancouver demo of this yesterday and it is pretty clear why they couldn't have it available for inspection at an event like this. It is located in a specially shielded room in their lab to reduce signal noise with a cooling system that cools a portion of the computer down to 4mK (extremely close to absolute zero).
Besides, even if I or anyone else there was able to inspect it, do you really think that we could look at it and say "hey, I don't see any quantum effects"