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D-Wave System Passes Rigorous Tests

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:30AM   
from the CQluaasnstiucmal-Superposition dept.

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.

(Background at Time, for those unfamiliar.)

• Re:108? or 128? or 512? Re:108? or 128? or 512? (Score: 2, Informative) by m on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:04PM

  by m (1741) on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:04PM (#11971)

  We already know that the D-Wave can't do Shor's algorithm and all the things a "real, full-blown quantum computer" can. The D-Wave is not a general quantum processor; it's a "quantum annealer" (yet to be conclusively proved that it's even that), which might improve over classical computers for a very specific subset of problems, not including super-fast integer factoring. Specifically, annealing means finding almost correct solutions to hard problems --- an "almost the best" Traveling Salesman solution, for example; something which classical algorithms are already reasonably good at, though a quantum system might be able to produce more accurate solutions faster.

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• Re:108? or 128? or 512? (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 06 2014, @08:18PM

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday March 06 2014, @08:18PM (#12177) Homepage

  You're right. I had forgotten that they'd already admitted to being quantum quacks.

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

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