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It performs computations; it does so using quantum effects; therefore it is a quantum computer. Every single thread that discusses D-Wave ends up with this sam

It performs computations; it does so using quantum effects; therefore it is a quantum computer. Every single thread that discusses D-Wave ends up with this same talking point about "universal" quantum computing. Yes, it's not yet another vaporware gate-model QC toy like Rigetti or Google have; it's a very specific sort of accelerator, somewhat akin to a GPU or a vector processor - not in terms of what it does, but in terms of requiring specific programming to make it useful. It's simply a vastly different architecture than gate-model QC: in many ways, it's a descendant of the analogue computers of the 60s and 70s. The key differentiator here is that they've been able to scale their model from a couple hundred qubits to >5000, in production for anyone to use online. If you're a mathematician and you can actually model your problems this way, they have a nice SDK and it's very usable. There's every reason to assume that they'll have 10k qubits with even more connectivity in a few years, and they have this hybrid solver thing which takes in 10k+ variables already, so it's clear they believe in the problem model itself. I just wish I could make it do more - my layman's interest has only taken me far enough to get a basic idea of what's going on for curiosity's sake. I think you need to be a mathematician in order to be able to do anything serious with it, right now.

IncRnd 6y ago
D-Wave doesn't make a general purpose quantum computer. The sense of that statement is that it cannot run Shor's algorithm, though it can factor integers, for example.
- core-questions 6y ago
  Are you a bot? I'm literally responding to this exact criticism. Yes, it's not a general purpose QC. Does that somehow make it (a real product you can use) less useful than a hypothetical QC from some other company that doesn't actually exist yet? This is like complaining about GPUs not being general purpose. Sure, that's a criticism, but it's not actually that valid.
reikonomusha 6y ago
You’re not even wrong. A digital signal processor does computations, therefore it’s a computer... right? In general, these days, people, especially technical, usually equate “computer” to “programmable computer”. This is as evidenced by the continual confusion as to what a D-Wave machine does and how they’re inequivalent to universal gate-based architectures. A lot of folks these days call the kind of ‘computer’ that D-Wave is an “accelerator”.
- adamisom 6y ago
  Sounds like different definitions, not not-even-wrongness. Parent commenter even mentioned it's akin to an accelerator.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > A digital signal processor does computations, therefore it’s a computer... right? Yes, absolutely it is. Just like how Babbage's difference engine was a computer, just like how a calculator is a computer. It's not a stored-program Von-Neumann turing complete thing, no, but that's clearly not the point - if you want one of those, wouldn't you just go to Intel et al? The point of the D-Wave machine is to make super specialized optimization functions fast. Most of us, myself included, barely understand what those are or why they're useful. People interested in ML and neural networks, on the other hand, may find a processor designed intrinsically to work on entire graphs at a time to be somewhat useful. Maybe it's not big enough to do that yet, but ENIAC wasn't big enough to run Firefox - was it useless?

IncRnd 6y ago

D-Wave doesn't make a general purpose quantum computer. The sense of that statement is that it cannot run Shor's algorithm, though it can factor integers, for example.

core-questions 6y ago
Are you a bot? I'm literally responding to this exact criticism. Yes, it's not a general purpose QC. Does that somehow make it (a real product you can use) less useful than a hypothetical QC from some other company that doesn't actually exist yet? This is like complaining about GPUs not being general purpose. Sure, that's a criticism, but it's not actually that valid.

reikonomusha 6y ago

You’re not even wrong. A digital signal processor does computations, therefore it’s a computer... right? In general, these days, people, especially technical, usually equate “computer” to “programmable computer”. This is as evidenced by the continual confusion as to what a D-Wave machine does and how they’re inequivalent to universal gate-based architectures. A lot of folks these days call the kind of ‘computer’ that D-Wave is an “accelerator”.

adamisom 6y ago
Sounds like different definitions, not not-even-wrongness. Parent commenter even mentioned it's akin to an accelerator.
core-questions 6y ago
> A digital signal processor does computations, therefore it’s a computer... right? Yes, absolutely it is. Just like how Babbage's difference engine was a computer, just like how a calculator is a computer. It's not a stored-program Von-Neumann turing complete thing, no, but that's clearly not the point - if you want one of those, wouldn't you just go to Intel et al? The point of the D-Wave machine is to make super specialized optimization functions fast. Most of us, myself included, barely understand what those are or why they're useful. People interested in ML and neural networks, on the other hand, may find a processor designed intrinsically to work on entire graphs at a time to be somewhat useful. Maybe it's not big enough to do that yet, but ENIAC wasn't big enough to run Firefox - was it useless?