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What do you think of Scott Aaronson's previous scepticism towards D-wave computers? I think it boiled down to them not doing a comparison with the best classica

What do you think of Scott Aaronson's previous scepticism towards D-wave computers? I think it boiled down to them not doing a comparison with the best classical algorithms running on the best classical computers. Are your comparisons apples to apples? I think what you wrote makes sense as a way of maximising the chances of producing a viable product. I suppose there aren't any guarantees that it will be competitive with bog-standard computers, but it might be a reasonable gamble.

mikewave 5y ago
I work on the classical computers around the exotic stuff, so I'm not really qualified to comment. Either way, Aaronson's negative commentary - which is many years out of date, at this point - is not something that anyone pays very much mind to, because at the end of the day one can't allow a mere critic on the sidelines to get in the way of actually producing real machines. > maximising the chances of producing a viable product That's the goal. The annealing QPU is a co-processor, like your GPU, like vector processors, or a DSP, etc. It doesn't need to compete with classical compute on the things classical compute is good at; it needs to compete on the things classical compute is bad at, or at the very least, bad at without throwing massive piles of money at it. There is a crossover point for optimization problems where we will be able to show a price/performance advantage over classical compute, which we term Quantum Advantage (vs. the more divisive term of Quantum Supremacy). The trick at this point is formulating problems in such a way as to be something you can run on our hardware, which still requires a deep mathematical skillset. This is something we're building on... perhaps pay attention to our Qubits conference coming up next week - https://www.qubits.com/ https://www.qubits.com/ - there should be some interesting announcements!

mikewave 5y ago

I work on the classical computers around the exotic stuff, so I'm not really qualified to comment. Either way, Aaronson's negative commentary - which is many years out of date, at this point - is not something that anyone pays very much mind to, because at the end of the day one can't allow a mere critic on the sidelines to get in the way of actually producing real machines. > maximising the chances of producing a viable product That's the goal. The annealing QPU is a co-processor, like your GPU, like vector processors, or a DSP, etc. It doesn't need to compete with classical compute on the things classical compute is good at; it needs to compete on the things classical compute is bad at, or at the very least, bad at without throwing massive piles of money at it. There is a crossover point for optimization problems where we will be able to show a price/performance advantage over classical compute, which we term Quantum Advantage (vs. the more divisive term of Quantum Supremacy). The trick at this point is formulating problems in such a way as to be something you can run on our hardware, which still requires a deep mathematical skillset. This is something we're building on... perhaps pay attention to our Qubits conference coming up next week - https://www.qubits.com/ https://www.qubits.com/ - there should be some interesting announcements!