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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.

9 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 Garridan · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As somebody who has used a DWave computer... you're asking the wrong question. They cannot run Firefox at any speed. They're analog computers purpose-built to solve extremely specialized optimization problems. But they don't necessarily "solve" problems -- they're likely to find good near-solutions. If you write an LLVM extension for which bitwise operations are computed as a solutions to an Ising spin glass problem, then it'd be waaay faster to run your Firefox port on DWave hardware backend than it would use a simulated annealing backend.

      And that would simply be awful.

    3. 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.

    4. Re:Help me put the speed of this into perspective. by daenris · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You might want to read the article (or even the summary). Google is saying that their results suggest that these computers are NOT just doing simulated annealing, but rather true quantum annealing.

    5. 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. Note careful terminology by Google by l2718 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Despite being a computing device that relies on quantum effects, D-Wave's machine is not a "quantum computer" as that term is defined by computer scientists.

    Commendably, Google's blog post calls the device a "quantum annealer", rejecting D-Wave's self-label of "quantum computer" which is a misleading marketing ploy. Perhaps if D-Wave's device had come before theoretical CS researcher defined their computational model, the term "quantum computer" would have taken a different meaning, but as things stand the meaning of "quantum computer" was fixed well before D-Wave was founded.

  3. Re:Proof that D-Wave is actually a Quantum Process by l2718 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Proof that D-Wave is actually a Quantum Process by quax · · Score: 4, Informative

    D-Wave has published about chip architecture for quite some time now. You must be frequenting the wrong science sites.

    Google for instance is following their overall approach but throw in hardware error correction. The latter has to be implemented via software on the D-Wave chip, which in essence is nothing more than a bunch of coupled josephson junctions (I heinously oversimplify of course, but there are now dozens of publication like this since D-Wave left the stealth mode).