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

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.

Comments

Re:Proof that D-Wave is actually a Quantum Process

[l2718]

So is this finally proof that D-Wave has actually produced a real working quantum processor and isn't just pulling the wool over everyone's eyes?

This finally proves that, in some applications, D-Wave's machine offers considerable speedup over alternatives. It also confirms that D-Wave's machine uses quantum effects to speed up computation, but this point was never in dispute.

However, the term "quantum computer" has a very specific meaning (just like "Turing machine" has a specific meaning), and D-Wave's machine isn't a quantum computer. They use that label, pretending that they mean the literal reading but hoping you get confused and think of the technical one.