The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet $30 Million On Quantum Computing Company

An anonymous reader writes "The CIA's investment fund, In-Q-Tel, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have invested $30 million in a Canadian company that claims to build quantum computers, reports Technology Review in a detailed story on why that startup, D-Wave, appears to be attracting serious interest after years of skepticism from experts. A spokesman for In-Q-Tel says that intelligence agencies 'have many complex problems that tax classical computing architecture,' a feeling apparently strong enough to justify a bet on a radically different, and largely unproven, approach to computing."

Comments

D-Wave might actually be legitimate

[AdmiralXyz]

Just a quick FYI: for those of you still assuming that D-Wave is a bunch of snake-oil salesman (like I did for a long time), take a look at this bit from Ars Technica. Basically what they've built is not a genuine quantum computer, but a sort of "quantum optimizer" that delivers speedups for some kinds of problems. Their crime might be that they just use too much marketing hyperbole, instead of being complete frauds.

Re:D-Wave might actually be legitimate

[exomondo]

The accuracy is the fundamental problem, with no error correction (or at least indications that there is an error), which is one of the biggest problems with their approach, it's worse than useless. In the protein folding experiment it got the correct answer just 13 out of 10,000 times.

Re:D-Wave might actually be legitimate

[w_dragon]

That depends on the problem. I assume the CIA wants it for breaking encryption, which means they want it for factoring large numbers. That's a problem that is really hard for a normal computer to do, but really easy for it to verify. If factoring a 1024 bit number takes 10000 tries, and each try takes a second, you're still several orders of magnitude better than the current state of the art and you've rendered many of the current common encryption schemes useless.

Re:D-Wave might actually be legitimate

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA wants it for decryption and is smart enough to know an adiabatic quantum computer can't be applied to factorization problems. The CIA wants it for the same reason Google did, image comparison.

What does quantum computing mean for developers?

[proca]

If I'm still developing when quantum computing becomes ubiquitous, how will programming work? Will booleans suddenly have 8 states? True, False, KindaTrue, MostlyFalse, Truthiness, TotallyBogus, WayCool, Cowabunga?

Re:What is it with these public-private partnershi

[strat]

The short answer is that the times have changed from back when government-funded applied research was a primary source of startup innovations. The reality is that small companies move faster and are more able to adjust to surprises in an agile manner than the Government. Now the tables have turned and the Government needs mechanisms to find new things because it's certainly not inventing them all in-house.

Speaking as one of the other members of the population, I have a few mixed feelings about the government using public funds for equity buys. Conversely, if that mechanism allows the USG to more rapidly gain access to novel inventions than they have and those inventions optimize the Government's performance, it's a drop in the bucket and probably saving the taxpayers a bundle.

If you find Google Earth useful, thank In-Q-Tel. When the startup that produced that technology was financed, only realtors in California had ever heard of it.

(Yes, I'm a little biased. I have been a part of some public-private partnerships that have performed well.)