This is much more important than Daesh/ISIS. If you think the US is threatened by these barbarians then they already achieved half their objective, getting into your head and under your skin. The other half of their objective is to get US troops involved into another mid-East quagmire.
When I lived in the Research Triangle I had these young dudes come by the house, with hardly any teeth left, offering me to clean the gutters or sell me fresh meat. The Research Triangle is nice, but as soon as your drive out of that oasis of wealth, you notice it is the aberration and not the other way around. I decided I rather raise my kids in Canada.
I think you exactly identified the disconnect between the scientists and the business crowd. Scientifically it would be quite significant to see true quantum speed-up, as it'll confirm what theory predicts, i.e. that quantum resources can be harnessed to perform better than any Turing machine or classical computer could.
For the business crowd any practical speed up will do - quantum be damned.
I regard this as an opportunity to educate the masses that Quantum Computers are not magical machines, and that the qubits aren't fairy dust. I.e. you can have a machine like D-Wave that utilizes them, yet is still fundamentally limited in what it can do.
I believe in the descriptiveness of language. Does it compute? Yes, in the case of the D-Wave. No, in case of the flash light.
Does it utilize qubits as basic information processing unite? Yes, again in case of the D-Wave.
Hence, it is justified to call it a quantum computer. Albeit, it should be qualified as a restricted adiabatic quantum computer, or quantum annealer.
Until we know what kind of quantum computing architecture will win, it is ludicrous to pretend that there is just one way to do quantum computing. Adiabatic, gate based or the underdog quantum cellular automaton are all viable architectures.
It just happens that the first commercially available is of the adiabatic variety. Theoretical CS folks may hate this and try to police the language, but frankly this is a bit silly.
And yes, I post a lot on this subject, because I've been following this soap opera for many years on my blog.
Agreed. The wavefunction is what collapses, although I guess you could call the phase transition out of superconductivity a collapse if so inclined. Just an odd way of putting it, what really collapses at that time is the Cooper-pair superpositions of the electrons. At any rate rather unusual verbiage.
It wasn't so much the test results that were misleading, then the way it was presented. The same applies to this test i.e. this is not comparing to an optimized solver.
One thing to add though, in addition to quantum tunneling true quantum annealing should also be able to tap into another resource: Entanglement. If qubits are entangled they are described by the same wavefunction, i.e. they are essentially a non-localized smeared out unity, and will experience the valleys in more than one place. Entanglement is very short lived on the D-Wave machine, and very sensitive to temperature increase.
The fact that the chip's performance is extremely dependant on the temperature indicates that it plays a crucial role, despite having at best very short lived uncontrolled entanglement on the chip.
(It also means that HTSC technology will not do, this approach to quantum computing has to be very close to absolute zero).
Every quantum computer is a probabilistic machine. It's baked into the cake.
The quantum superposition collapses when you measure. Just one measurement will not necessarily give you the right answer (this also holds for gate based quantum computers e.g. Shor's factorization algorithm).
But just like Probabilistic Turing machines can outperform their deterministic brethren, quantum computers can do more than Turing machines with only a classical random number source, because quantum probabilities follow non-classical, non-localized rules.
They idea that this is a scam is indeed laughable. Let's forget for a moment that in comparison to the chip they are running a classical chip would have a very different heat signature. The company would also have gone to incredible length to produce niobium lithographic processes to produce fake chips like the one on display in their reception area. And then they would have produced several peer reviewed articles on a technology that doesn't exist.
Then again I know people who believe the Boston marathon bombing was a hoax. The ability of the human mind for self-delusion is apparently limitless.
NP complete problems can be encoded in a quantum hamiltonian, but that does not mean at all that an adiabatic quantum computer could find the minima instantaneously.
Balderdash. There is no heating up involved to collapse the superconductivity. Rather the flux is read-out/measured via SQUID and as with any measurement it collapses the quantum mechanical superposition - in this case spin up and down magnetic fluxes in the same Josephson junction.
Slashdot Mirror
You are probably right :-)
This is much more important than Daesh/ISIS. If you think the US is threatened by these barbarians then they already achieved half their objective, getting into your head and under your skin. The other half of their objective is to get US troops involved into another mid-East quagmire.
When I lived in the Research Triangle I had these young dudes come by the house, with hardly any teeth left, offering me to clean the gutters or sell me fresh meat. The Research Triangle is nice, but as soon as your drive out of that oasis of wealth, you notice it is the aberration and not the other way around. I decided I rather raise my kids in Canada.
I think you exactly identified the disconnect between the scientists and the business crowd. Scientifically it would be quite significant to see true quantum speed-up, as it'll confirm what theory predicts, i.e. that quantum resources can be harnessed to perform better than any Turing machine or classical computer could.
For the business crowd any practical speed up will do - quantum be damned.
I regard this as an opportunity to educate the masses that Quantum Computers are not magical machines, and that the qubits aren't fairy dust. I.e. you can have a machine like D-Wave that utilizes them, yet is still fundamentally limited in what it can do.
Please ask a any first grader if this amounts to the kind of complexity that is meant when people use the word "compute".
Good point :-)
Interesting, wasn't aware of that, especially since in practice randomized algorithm often outperform the next best deterministic ones.
What informs this conjecture?
I believe in the descriptiveness of language. Does it compute? Yes, in the case of the D-Wave. No, in case of the flash light.
Does it utilize qubits as basic information processing unite? Yes, again in case of the D-Wave.
Hence, it is justified to call it a quantum computer. Albeit, it should be qualified as a restricted adiabatic quantum computer, or quantum annealer.
Until we know what kind of quantum computing architecture will win, it is ludicrous to pretend that there is just one way to do quantum computing. Adiabatic, gate based or the underdog quantum cellular automaton are all viable architectures.
It just happens that the first commercially available is of the adiabatic variety. Theoretical CS folks may hate this and try to police the language, but frankly this is a bit silly.
And yes, I post a lot on this subject, because I've been following this soap opera for many years on my blog.
The underlying scientific paper could already be misleading. But in both cases, as far as I can tell, this wasn't the case.
As to the presentation, it's the kind of typical marketing spin that you get anywhere in the IT industry.
If you want the truth and look at the papers, the truth you'll get.
Agreed. The wavefunction is what collapses, although I guess you could call the phase transition out of superconductivity a collapse if so inclined. Just an odd way of putting it, what really collapses at that time is the Cooper-pair superpositions of the electrons. At any rate rather unusual verbiage.
It wasn't so much the test results that were misleading, then the way it was presented. The same applies to this test i.e. this is not comparing to an optimized solver.
I see you looked it up. Well done.
Pretty good picture of the process.
One thing to add though, in addition to quantum tunneling true quantum annealing should also be able to tap into another resource: Entanglement. If qubits are entangled they are described by the same wavefunction, i.e. they are essentially a non-localized smeared out unity, and will experience the valleys in more than one place. Entanglement is very short lived on the D-Wave machine, and very sensitive to temperature increase.
The fact that the chip's performance is extremely dependant on the temperature indicates that it plays a crucial role, despite having at best very short lived uncontrolled entanglement on the chip.
(It also means that HTSC technology will not do, this approach to quantum computing has to be very close to absolute zero).
Every quantum computer is a probabilistic machine. It's baked into the cake.
The quantum superposition collapses when you measure. Just one measurement will not necessarily give you the right answer (this also holds for gate based quantum computers e.g. Shor's factorization algorithm).
But just like Probabilistic Turing machines can outperform their deterministic brethren, quantum computers can do more than Turing machines with only a classical random number source, because quantum probabilities follow non-classical, non-localized rules.
You must have missed this clue in the abstract:
"Here, we present results from tests on a 108 qubit D-Wave One device based on superconducting flux qubits."
This paper was instrumental in settling the question if D-Wave performs quantum annealing.
At this point I don't know of many serious researchers who doubt the accumulated evidence that D-Wave actually manages to implement quantum annealing.
How useful that actually is remains to be seen.
They idea that this is a scam is indeed laughable. Let's forget for a moment that in comparison to the chip they are running a classical chip would have a very different heat signature. The company would also have gone to incredible length to produce niobium lithographic processes to produce fake chips like the one on display in their reception area. And then they would have produced several peer reviewed articles on a technology that doesn't exist.
Then again I know people who believe the Boston marathon bombing was a hoax. The ability of the human mind for self-delusion is apparently limitless.
No, quantum annealing only shares conceptual similarities to this macroscopic physical process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Don't forget to write a note to the Physical Review X journal, they apparently have abysmal peer review.
Any particular reason why you ignore the other paper I linked?
Why didn't they get Maple syrup instead?
And who forced NASA and Google to get their machine?
"the solution would be found effectively instantly ....since the atoms go through all possible quantum states simultaneously."
This is not the way a Quantum Computer works. You invoke the quantum parallel fallacy that that Scott Aaranson devotes an entire book to.
NP complete problems can be encoded in a quantum hamiltonian, but that does not mean at all that an adiabatic quantum computer could find the minima instantaneously.
Generally quantum computer are not expected to find solutions to NP complete problems in poly-linear time.
Balderdash. There is no heating up involved to collapse the superconductivity. Rather the flux is read-out/measured via SQUID and as with any measurement it collapses the quantum mechanical superposition - in this case spin up and down magnetic fluxes in the same Josephson junction.
Never took QM 101, did you?
If you can do quantum annealing with the same set up I see a Nobel price coming your way :-)
The q word actually means something.
There's a world of difference between a classical system like you describe and quantum annealing.
At any rate, entanglement on the chip has been demonstrated, and outside experts comparing different models to characterize the chip, also came to the conclusion that it indeed performs quantum annealing.
At this point this question can be regarded as settled.
The only open, remaining question is how useful quantum annealing will be in practice.
As to Feynman, his original proposal of a quantum simulator is much closer to adiabatic quantum computing, i.e. D-Wave, then the gate model that took hold after Deutsch's seminal paper.