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D-Wave Open Sources Its Quantum Computing Tool (gcn.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the code-for-qubits dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader haruchai writes: Canadian company D-Wave has released their qbsolv tool on GitHub to help bolster interest and familiarity with quantum computing. "qbsolv is a metaheuristic or partitioning solver that solves a potentially large QUBO problem by splitting it into pieces that are solved either on a D-Wave system or via a classical tabu solver," they write on GitHub.

This joins the QMASM macro assembler for D-Wave systems, a tool written in Python by Scott Pakin of Los Alamos National Labs. D-Wave president Bo Ewald says "D-Wave is driving the hardware forward but we need more smart people thinking about applications, and another set thinking about software tools."

2 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Be sure to drink your Ovaltine. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Informative
    • QUBO - Quadratic unconstrained binary optimization is a pattern matching technique, common in machine learning applications. QUBO is an NP hard problem.
    • Tabu search take[s] a potential solution to a problem and check its immediate neighbors (that is, solutions that are similar except for one or two minor details) in the hope of finding an improved solution. Local search methods have a tendency to become stuck in suboptimal regions or on plateaus where many solutions are equally fit.
  2. Re:What?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    qbsolv: name of the program
    partitioning: a family of methods for solving hard optimisation problems by splitting it up into subproblems
    metaheuristic: a heuristic that generates heuristics
    QUBO: quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation
    D-Wave: the company that makes these machines
    classical: non-quantum
    tabu: A Tongan word, meaning "things that cannot be touched because they are sacred" (also spelled "taboo"). In this context, referring to tabu search, a common approach for solving hard optimisation problems on classical computers which involves marking certain potential solutions as "untouchable" if they've been seen recently, to avoid going over already-covered ground.

    Now, the translation:

    D-Wave is a Canadian company which makes quantum computers. It will either make (because it works) or break (because if Geordie Rose's hype implodes it will take the technology with it) quantum computing for a decade or two. The problem that D-Wave machines solve is a quirky one. It solves a specific optimisation problem, the details of which are unimportant for this discussion, but it's an optimisation (Ising spin minimisation) on problems that have a specific shape. This shape is the topology of the chip which D-Wave built. But all is not lost.

    QUBO is an NP-hard optimisation problem that it is believed that certain classes of quantum computers (including D-Wave) can do especially well at, and it's also a problem that lots of real-world interesting NP-hard problems map onto in a reasonably clean way.

    This program takes an arbitrary QUBO problem instance and tries to split it up into pieces that can either be run on a D-Wave machine or on a classical solver.