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Lockheed Martin Purchases First Commercial Quantum Computer
Panaflex writes "D-Wave systems announced general availability for its 128 qubit adiabatic quantum machine just two weeks ago, and reports of its first sale to Lockheed Martin have come out."
The D-Wave Systems site has a rather informative collection of quantum computing papers.
Spellcheckers don't usually help with grammar.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
An Adiabatic Quantum Computer is quite a different beast from a quantum computer in the usual sense, and even if it can solve the same class of problems in polynomial time (not at all obvious at this stage) it isn't at all clear that 1 qubit in this machine does the same work as 1 traditional qubit.
They are, to be honest, being a little bit naughty calling this a quantum computer at all, although it does compute and has quanta, but so does my phone.
I found the D-Wave white papers very hard to understand, but I'm sure it's because of a poor translation from the original Vulcan to (sortof) English.
I'm simultaneously for and against this.
Schrödinger? Is that you?
...but I'm uncertain if I'll buy one. Maybe I should check with my cat.
Oh NOW you remember to check the cat. It's been locked in that box for a week now. It's dead.
or is it?
think instead, that solving the hamiltonian is equivalent to (or potentially "harder than") solving the original problem, so that you can translate the original problem into a hamiltonian problem. it doesn't mean that you know the answer of either, but you do know that the solution of the hamiltonian will match up to a solution of the original problem. this is the spirit of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_(complexity)
very, very roughly, think of it like rewriting java, for example, as c. you may not know what the particular code actually DOES in an overall sense, or what it will output, but you can nevertheless rewrite it sort of mechanically (like a compiler would) if you know both languages. furthermore, it's feasible that translating the code is easier than devising the algorithm from scratch. this is basically a reduction. if you can "easily" rewrite any java code as c code, that means java is "reducible" to c. the theory of computation essentially deals with reductions, not of code, but of entire problem classes, which is where P, NP and all that come from.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I guess I am just have to wait for the Apple Quantum Computer User Experience
Me too -- in particular I'm looking forward to the quantum MWI version of FaceTime, which connects you to various alternate-universe versions of yourself, so you can compare notes and see who made the better decisions.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.