4 ms·

Can someone explain this to those of use who have no clue what these calculations are good for? If this machine is faster to do something, what would you use th

Can someone explain this to those of use who have no clue what these calculations are good for? If this machine is faster to do something, what would you use that something for?

deleted 11y ago
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cjmoran 11y ago
The YouTube channel "In a Nutshell" released a good summary on this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq28
- archgoon 11y ago
  That video is about Gate Quantum Computers; DWave machines are NOT gate quantum computers; they call their machine quantum annealing machines. It is not known the complexity class of problems that can be solved efficiently by quantum annealing machines, or if that class is equivalent to classical machines. The result shows that the DWave machine is asymptotically faster than the Simulated Annealing algorithm (yay!), which suggests that it is executing the Quantum Annealing algorithm. However, the the paper also explicitly states that this does not mean that the Dwave machine is exhibiting a 'quantum speedup'. To do this, they would need to show it to outperform the best known classical algorithm, which as the paper acknowledges, it does not. What the paper does seem to be showing is that the machine in question is actually fundamentally quantum in nature; it's just not clear yet that that the type of quantum computer it is is an improvement over classical ones.
mcguire 11y ago
"If this machine is faster to do something..." That's the point; is the machine faster? If the machine is actually doing quantum computing, it won't slow down as much for larger problems (for some problems). But they haven't been able to prove that it's doing quantum magic.
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lmm 11y ago
At the moment, it's only faster for the useless task of simulating itself. The hope is that that can be extended to more practical questions, but for now it's a pure research project.

Can someone explain this to those of use who have no clue what these calculations are good for? If this machine is faster to do something, what would you use that something for?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

cjmoran 11y ago

The YouTube channel "In a Nutshell" released a good summary on this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq28

archgoon 11y ago
That video is about Gate Quantum Computers; DWave machines are NOT gate quantum computers; they call their machine quantum annealing machines. It is not known the complexity class of problems that can be solved efficiently by quantum annealing machines, or if that class is equivalent to classical machines. The result shows that the DWave machine is asymptotically faster than the Simulated Annealing algorithm (yay!), which suggests that it is executing the Quantum Annealing algorithm. However, the the paper also explicitly states that this does not mean that the Dwave machine is exhibiting a 'quantum speedup'. To do this, they would need to show it to outperform the best known classical algorithm, which as the paper acknowledges, it does not. What the paper does seem to be showing is that the machine in question is actually fundamentally quantum in nature; it's just not clear yet that that the type of quantum computer it is is an improvement over classical ones.

mcguire 11y ago

"If this machine is faster to do something..." That's the point; is the machine faster? If the machine is actually doing quantum computing, it won't slow down as much for larger problems (for some problems). But they haven't been able to prove that it's doing quantum magic.

deleted 11y ago

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lmm 11y ago

At the moment, it's only faster for the useless task of simulating itself. The hope is that that can be extended to more practical questions, but for now it's a pure research project.