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World’s first commercial quantum computer sold to Lockheed Martin
- mw63214 15y agoGood to see this type news being shared publicly. What ever happened to Bob Gelfond & MagiQ?
- Dabacon 15y agoStill alive and kicking. There are also a few other quantum cryptograph companies around including http://www.idquantique.com/ http://www.idquantique.com/ and http://www.quintessencelabs.com/ http://www.quintessencelabs.com/
- foob 15y agoTwo months ago we had a story that 14 qubits was the largest quantum computer yet (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404470 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404470). This one now has 128? Is this just a money difference, was this a huge engineering breakthrough, or is there something else going on here?
- mturmon 15y agoThere's something else going on here. The one-line explanation is that true QC requires quantum entanglement to be preserved, for reasonably long time scales, across all qubits. It's not believed that the D-Wave 128-bit machine does this, although the 8-bit one seems to. Here's the opinion of an independent critic: http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-prof-scott-aaronson-on-d-waves-quantum-computer/ http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-pr...
- sbierwagen 15y agoD-Wave has a long, long history of making grandiose claims and completely failing to back them up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Criticism All this press release proves is that they got a defense contractor to spend $10 million dollars.
- ddkrone 15y agoNot just any defense contractor, Lockheed Martin. They're practically another branch of the government and wouldn't exist without tax payers. So technically US tax payers just bought a 10 million dollar toy.
- keyle 15y agoI agree. And the article just writes so much marketing gospel you have to wonder if they even understand what they're writing.
- Devilboy 15y agoThey've recently published a paper in Nature that shows an 8 qubit version of their adiabatic device really is a quantum computer so this is not complete bullshit anymore. We'll see what Lockheed says about the device. Maybe in the next few years a DWave will make a bigger quantum computer and we'll see if Lockheed keeps buying. This looks like the 'real thing' although they've not yet figured out how to run, for example, Shor's algorithm on an adabiatic QC yet. Also 128 qubits is not enough to tackle problems intractable to current classical computers. And finally this device by DWave is hardwired to perform only one type of optimization search, it's not a 'general purpose' computer yet.
- cdibona 15y agoActually, if you read the story, it says that they delivered one to Lockheed, and that the cost of a D-Wave one is 10m, not that Lockheed paid D-Wave 10m. They might have, but this story isn't that conclusive.
- cheez 15y agoI worked with someone who worked there. It's not all bullshit but one of the founders has got big dreams/plans and so comes off as a bullshit artist. Even my former colleague says he thought a lot of it was a little iffy but he never doubted they'd eventually get there. The stories were awesome.
- raarky 15y agoi guess it's at least a step into sort of the right direction of quantum computing :)
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- nraynaud 15y agowasn't D-wave a scam company?
- Devilboy 15y agoThere are lots of people questioning whether their device is really a quantum computer but D-Wave has published many papers in peer-reviewed literature and so just calling them a 'scam company' is a bit strong. We'll see soon enough once more people get their hands on these devices. If they really are a 'scam company' they won't last long now that they're shipping actual hardware.
- andrewcross 15y agoI'd love to know how many people in the world actually understand quantum computing with reasonable depth. My bet is less than 500. I will be the first to confess that I have no idea what they are talking about most of the time.
- bdhe 15y agoHere are a couple of articles on the announcement by Scott Aaronson and Dave Bacon (professors at MIT and U Washington). http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-prof-scott-aaronson-on-d-waves-quantum-computer/ http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-pr... http://www.quora.com/Is-the-D-Wave-One-a-true-quantum-computer http://www.quora.com/Is-the-D-Wave-One-a-true-quantum-comput...
- bmohlenhoff 15y agoScott Aaronson is basically THE go-to guy for anything involving complexity theory or quantum computing. His explanations are phenomenal and his blog is usually full of easily understood information. He posted something a few weeks ago about the D-wave situation and pointed to that article he did for Forbes. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=639 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=639
- Locke1689 15y agoI wouldn't say Aaronson is the premier expert on computational complexity. That would probably be Lance Fortnow who literally writes the blog on computational complexity (http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/ http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/). RJ Lipton is pretty notable, as well http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/ http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/.
- count 15y agoHe didn't suggest Aaronson was the premier expert, he suggested he was the best person to go to for clear, easy to understand explanations (such as in the Forbes piece linked). These are completely different things.
- senthilnayagam 15y agoWant to know if these quantum computers have any Operating system and what Programing languages are used to build the programs
- Devilboy 15y agoThis particular device is only wired to do one kind of optimization search - basically it does a variant of the 'traveling salesman' shortest route search. There's no OS or programming language, it's just an 'oracle' device. You set the states of the qubits via the inputs, let it 'run' for a bit and then you read the results.
- wtracy 15y agoSo, it's more like an expensive ASIC and not a general-purpose computer?
- smanek 15y ago"I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." That's like hearing about a faster-than-light spaceship and asking about what kind of seats it has.
- JeremyBanks 15y agoDon't be a jackass. It's a much more minor mistake to assume extra similarities between conventional and quantum computers than to assume that computers are effective magic.
- necrodome 15y agoIts OS is built with alien technology (aka LISP) http://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/learning-to-program-the-d-wave-one-software-you-should-install-a-book-you-should-buy/#comment-21948 http://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/learning-to-program-th...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mr23 15y agoThis kind of sounds like bs. For several years now quantum computers have had a very low number of qubits, only incrementally increasing every once and a while. Now this thing nearly 10x the qubits? I don't think so, such a breakthrough would make much more news than this.
- Dabacon 15y agoThe D-wave machine is different from a general purpose quantum computer which is why it can have many more qubits than the more traditional approach that you are most like to have heard of in the press. That said no one knows what the power of this type of machine is and calling in a quantum computer is probably stretching it a bit. Here are some details for those interested: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-D-Wave-One-a-true-quantum-computer/answer/Dave-Bacon-1 http://www.quora.com/Is-the-D-Wave-One-a-true-quantum-comput...
- juiceandjuice 15y agoThe real kicker is programming it with punch cards.
- IChrisI 15y agoIt's hard because you need quantum punch cards.
- chopsueyar 15y agoI have a feeling this will become a ThinkGeek product.
- jorangreef 15y agoThis could pose a problem to the BitCoin money supply.