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Google and NASA Still on Board With D-Wave, Upgrade to 2048 "Qubits"

posted by on Wednesday March 15 2017, @01:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the able-to-solve-the-travelling-salesman-problem-in-just-6-years dept.

takyon writes:

Google, NASA, and Universities Space Research Association (USRA) run a joint research lab called the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL). That partnership has used a 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum annealer, upgraded to the 1,152-qubit D-Wave 2x, and is now upgrading again to the company's latest D-Wave 2000Q system (2048 qubits):

Google, NASA, and the USRA are now buying the latest generation D-Wave quantum computer, as well, to further explore its potential. The new D-Wave 2000Q is not just up to 1,000 times faster than the previous generation, but it also has better controls, allowing QuAIL to tweak it for its algorithms. QuAIL is now looking at developing machine learning algorithms that can take advantage of D-Wave's latest quantum annealing computer.

[...] D-Wave also announced that it will help the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) establish a quantum computing research center for defense and intelligence purposes. D-Wave's role will be to aid the Virginia Tech staff in developing applications and software tools for its quantum annealing computers. [...] Because D-Wave is not a universal quantum computer, like what Google and IBM plan to build over the next few years, it is not expected to be useful in cracking encryption. Virginia Tech plans to also focus on developing machine learning algorithms for the D-Wave computers.

Previously: Trees Are the New Cats: D-Wave Used for Machine Vision

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2017, @03:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2017, @03:45AM (#479268)
    If you were doing, say, Shor’s factoring algorithm on a quantum computer, it is very easy to verify that you got the right answer. It is rather more difficult to factor 13469657115923730465476034829951946177950265421520366540751797776042247759687 than to verify that its prime factors are 45322932172349524671438274837802429141 and 297192976498137018812732444515676577707. It takes a few nanoseconds to do the multiplication of those two numbers on modern hardware, while it takes over two minutes to factor their product on my Xeon E5-1607 v3 (3.10 GHz) using msieve. If your quantum computer managed to get the factors faster, it is easy enough to verify after the fact.