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Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing (blogspot.ca)

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-10^16-times-faster-than-cowboyanneal dept.

An anonymous reader sends this report form the Google Research blog on the effectiveness of D-Wave's 2X quantum computer: We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10^8. A more detailed paper is available at the arXiv.

5 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Help me put the speed of this into perspective. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm having trouble visualizing just how fast one of these computers would be.

    If I were to buy one of these computers, would it be fast enough to run Firefox at a reasonable speed?

    1. Re:Help me put the speed of this into perspective. by ClickOnThis · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm having trouble visualizing just how fast one of these computers would be.

      If I were to buy one of these computers, would it be fast enough to run Firefox at a reasonable speed?

      Given that it's a quantum processor ... yes and no.

      Wait, you said Firefox? Then no.

      --
      If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
    2. Re:Help me put the speed of this into perspective. by cfalcon · · Score: 5, Funny

      Sorry, four or more tabs on Firefox is NP Complete. The quantum speed up is only square root of N- not enough for something like that.

    3. Re:Help me put the speed of this into perspective. by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Funny

      But they don't necessarily "solve" problems -- they're likely to find good near-solutions.

      So the result would render webpages differently with each browser you visit? Situation normal then!

  2. In other news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Light bulb found to light up a room over 99% closer to the speed of light as a simulated lightbulb took to run a simulation of the same on our desktop computer.