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.'"

Comments

this story never seems to be correct.

[nimbius]

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.