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

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."

Comments

What??

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"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"

I know some of those words but all I can really tell is that it apparently does things to stuff, or does stuff to things.

Re: What??

[MartyJG]

It's both words and not words at the same time.

Re:What??

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.

[0100010001010011]

• 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.

marketroids

[John_3000]

"we need more smart people thinking about applications" = we have a solution looking for a problem

"quantum" computing

[globaljustin]

D-wave is not quantum computing. It's regular, non-quantum computing that uses software to simulate what we think using non-locality in computing would be.

Humans actually controlling quantum non-locality would be arguably the biggest feat since harnessing the atom...it amazes me how this blatant bs continues to be called "quantum"...

Re: "quantum" computing

[quax]

The hedging in the paper is the typical verbiage that you get with any data driven study.

At any rate, it wouldn't be classical computing in the digital sense but reduce to a mostly analog annealer. The original claim was that the D-Wave machine was essentially a fake, and this has been discredited three ways till Sunday.

They set out to build a quantum annealer and it acts like one. What is unclear is how useful this process will actually be in practice. Quantum speed-ups are not at all guaranteed with this design. That's were the focus should be. Not some rehashed conspiracy theory that D-Wave is faking their hardware.

Re:This won't help solving real world problems

[ffkom]

Because D-Wave managed (via clever marketing) to scare a few organizations with deep pockets into thinking that if they didn't buy D-Wave systems, they could miss that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a miraculous Quantum computer at hand while their competitors/enemies do not.

Re:This won't help solving real world problems

[Pseudonym]

Here's a slightly more neutral answer:

Because D-Wave is a decade ahead of every other competing technology when it comes engineering and systems integration. D-Wave machines do actually work on real-world problems. They do not work as well as carefully-tuned classical approaches, but they do work.

It's possible that the D-Wave approach may be an evolutionary dead-end for quantum computing. Most people who understand the technology and are outside D-Wave (including Google and Lockheed) would probably put the odds at greater than 50% that D-Wave isn't the most promising approach. Nonetheless, we owe it to ourselves as an industry to test it because it's the only one that's here now.