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D-Wave Announces Commercially Available Quantum Computer
New submitter peetm writes "Computing company D-Wave has announced they're selling a quantum computing system commercially, which they're calling the D-Wave One. The D-Wave system comes equipped with a 128-qubit processor designed to perform discrete optimization operations. A qubit is the basic unit of quantum information – analogous to a bit in conventional computing. For a broader understanding of how qubits work, check out Ars Technica's excellent guide."
I would imagine that operations are instant. Unfortunately all the data gets sent to an identical 'you' in a parallel universe.......
Sigs are for losers....oh wait...damnit
The name "quantum computer" is a bit misleading, since this thing as far as I understood is a classical computer that performs quickly an algorithm called quantum annealing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing). If I understand correctly, the "128 qubits" part is snake oil, and it has nothing to do with the explanation of qubits given by Ars Technica in the other link.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
old news!
0 frames in Crysis, this is a math co-processor type deal initially. Just speeds up processing for a specific type of quantum algorithm initially. ( Quantum annealing , min/ max )
You could build the ultimate Crysis bot with it.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
"I'm completely operational, and all my circuits are functioning perfectly"
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
This has the same central problem as before. D-Wave's computers haven't demonstrated that their commercial bits are entangled. There's no way to really distinguish what they are doing from essentially classical simulated annealing. And the set of problems which their machines can supposedly works on is an NP-hard problem minimization problem involving Ising spin where it isn't even clear that from a complexity standpoint that the the problem can be more quickly solved in general by a quantum system. (Essentially we don't know the relationship between BQP, the set of problems reliably solvable on a quantum computer in polynomial time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP and NP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_(complexity). Recommended reading that is skeptical of D-Wave's claims is much of what Scott Aaronson has wrote about them. See for example http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=639, http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=198 although interestingly after he visited D-Wave's labs in person his views changed slightly and became slightly more sympathetic to them http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=954.
Dear Sir, I am a Nigerian Professor of great fame, and I will make this one-time offer to You only ..........
for a ridiculous price of $100$ only!
My excellent quantum computer is cleverly disguised as an old Nike sneaker box,
so You can use it without fear of authorirties.
For further information, please send $10 to the following account for mail processing costs
and attach your credit card number for billing.
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~banach/COMP39112.Info/index.html A course at University of Manchester on Quantum Computing. The lecture notes are all there. It's a course I took myself as an undergraduate.
How many frames will this get in Crysis?
All of them, at the same time. Until you look at it, at which point you'll just get one, which might not be the one you want.
You see... you quantum computer is not fast enough yet.
All - author of the piece speaking here. Yes, I'm aware of the D-Wave controversies, and talked with Scott Aaronson in a later piece at the time of the announcement. I'm cringing a little bit as I re-read this post because I know a heck of a lot more about quantum computing now than I did then. My take on D-Wave's computer now is that it's probably not a 'true' quantum computer in the sense that it involves any quantum speedup or entanglement. That said, I think that their annealing process is interesting in and of itself. I see their quantum computing tag as being akin to calling something '4G' in the wireless world. For those more interested in quantum computing, I updated the post to include some of the Q&A's I did about D-Wave at the time, as well as some of the quantum computing research I've covered since then, including some conversations with quantum computing researchers.
For those who would like a gentle introduction to quantum computing take a look at: A Smidgen of Quantum Computing
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Au contraire!
Anyone with a basic knowledge of binary maths can see that First_post & !First_post equals !First_post, so in a roundabout (and almost certainly unintended) way, he's correct to not be the first post.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Yes, but it isn't the same type that D-Wave's processor solves, which is to say solving a particular class of differential equation in up to 16 8-bit variables.
Most of the time spent in ray tracing is actually in database searching (finding objects that a ray intersects with), which can be sped up by a quantum algorithm, but it isn't one that can be implemented on D-Wave's machine.
Apparently, a quantum computer allows slashdot editors to see backwards in time.
Since this article was posted.....
5/17/2011 @ 2:34PM
Right, that's almost a year ago that this "announcement" took place.
Whoops!
well actually i doesn't really matter, you have mergesort (nlogn) and binarysearch(nlogn) for classic logarithmic search. So, yes, for an unsorted dataset the sort&search time would be 2nlogn
...they're only available in alternative universes.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Umm, ray tracing is math.
All 3d rendering is based on maths, unfortunately ray tracing involves repeatedly traversing large data sets, something that any co-processor which is a long way from the main system memory bus is going to be shockingly bad at.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
how do i know your real? I've never heard of a Nigerian Professor, i though everyone over there was a Prince
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
My quantum computer is full of cats. maybe.