AnonTechie points us towards updates on the evaluation of D-Wave's annealing devices.
From Phys.org's reporting on the latest tests:
With cutting-edge technology, sometimes the first step scientists face is just making sure it actually works as intended. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering is home to the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC), a super-cooled, magnetically shielded facility specially built to house the first commercially available quantum computing processors; devices so advanced that there are only two in use outside the Canadian lab where they were built. The first one went to USC and Lockheed Martin, and the second to NASA and Google. Since USC's facility opened in October 2011, a key task for researchers has been to determine whether D-Wave processors operate as hoped using the special laws of quantum mechanics to offer potentially higher-speed processing, instead of operating in a classical, traditional way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @10:15AM
"I know there's most likely a lot of industrial secrets and patents involved"
Patents are supposed to be the antithesis of 'industrial secrets' but I suspect they will do absolutely nothing to reveal any of those secrets.
It's also interesting to note that Canada, and not the U.S., is the ones building this technology. It seems like everyone else is building the new innovation of the future while the U.S. is simply buying it all and falling behind in our knowledge of how it works and our ability to build and document it.