Slashdot Mirror
Study Doubts Quantum Computer Speed
Alain Williams writes "The BBC reports that a new academic study has raised doubts about the performance of a commercial quantum computer in certain circumstances. In some tests devised by a team of researchers, the commercial quantum computer has performed no faster than a standard desktop machine. 'The study has been submitted to a journal, but has not yet completed the peer review process to verify the findings. And D-Wave told BBC News the tests set by the scientists were not the kinds of problems where quantum computers offered any advantage over classical types.'"
A qbit computer already matches conventional computers in speed? I'm impressed!
it may be faster , slower or both
Since I haven't read the actual paper, I'll give the researchers the benefit of the doubt. But the BBC reporting is terrible. What I got from the story is that a study has demonstrated that this Quantum computer isn't better at everything. Well, duh! Everyone who has even very casually followed Quantum computing knows that they are a new class of computing which can solve a limited set of problems very quickly. I'm really not much wiser after reading this story.
the D-Wave, once we wade through the marketing schtick and look at the technical specifications is a quantum annealer. its not designed to solve a calculation but rather to put us close...it does this from the global minimum of a given objective function over a given set of candidate solutions (candidate states), by a process using quantum fluctuations.
im not trolling over semantics though! annealers are extremely important to solving very difficult mathematic equations, and in many examples quantum annealing has been vastly superior to traditional computational methods. We should do machines like the D-Wave better justice though. Compare it instead to a traditional annealer.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Yeah, kinda what I was thinking.
Either tell us some of the things this can do faster, or we're going to have to assume this is smoke and mirrors.
If it is a real thing, there must be specific types of problems which can be identified where it is faster, and where that can be demonstrated as being significantly faster.
But if there aren't any of those, one does need to question if their claims are true.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In more accurate news, Formula One car proves sucky at handling the monthly grocery shop...
DWave don't have to "enlighten us": the statistical tests that distinguish quantum and classical annealing are in the public domain and they've been open about which of those tests they think the machine should pass. The trouble is that it's hard to run those tests cleanly, which is what the study is about:
Here we show how to define and measure quantum speedup in various scenarios, and how to avoid pitfalls that might mask or fake quantum speedup.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Maybe it's quantum marketing, and is therefore both true and false at the same time.
Which would make it indistinguishable from all other marketing.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It also hasn't been established that the D-Wave is at all a quantum computer. They've refused to say how it works in that regard, and there has been no proof that any quantum entanglements even take place inside the box.
But it's QUANTUM!
So's my dishwasher powder.
The d-Wave machine supposedly operates under the principles of an adiabatic quantum computer. There is a considerable controversy in the field regarding what machines of that type can and cannot do. But even d-Wave itself does not claim that the machine can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial type, see also the Wikipedia article. So this article is actually not news but olds. And it is obvious that the author has not a iota of understanding of the distinction of a fully fledged quantum computer and the d-Wave machine.
Reviewers often are working in similar spaces too. I had a paper that failed review the first couple times because the reviewer wanted more data on a particular area of the project. It didn't affect the main idea of the paper or in any way directly contribute to our argument. The reviewer needed some charts generated because he was working on a similar project and it would help for him to have some other paper that he could reference to get started/justify his paper. So not only low paid work sometimes low paid work for someone who you didn't even know was your boss :)
The Google Quantum AI lab puts this news into perspective and I put my positive spin on it here.
Having talked with one of the co-authors of the paper, he actually came away impressed at how far D-Wave has come in ten years. Although not yet far enough that I'd win my bet with him, that the D-Wave two could beat classical computing across the board.
So in short, yes, the BBC's reporting on quantum computing is atrocious. Not the first time either.
Just like digital improves the quality of everything.
Except music, if you're an audiophile who prefers vinyl.
I don't care one way or the other about the audio, but I'm a true hipster videophile, and I insist on watching everything on VHS. It's hard to describe, but VHS gives a warmer, softer, smoother picture without all those annoying dots distracting you from the filmmaker's true vision.