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Most folks in the field don't believe it's quantum. Benchmarking is a truly stupid way to test something's quantumness. It's a bit like a company selling fusion
by gaze 13y ago
Most folks in the field don't believe it's quantum. Benchmarking is a truly stupid way to test something's quantumness. It's a bit like a company selling fusion reactors who puts their reactor in a car, and then races it, and when they kinda sorta beat their competitor, they say "clearly had to be fusion." Ideally you'd try to use the zeno effect to watch the thing slow down as you "turn off" it's quantum behavior, but d-wave haven't given us that dial. There are then papers from d-wave that say that the thing is quantum because in an 8-qubit spin chain, they see an avoided crossing. I don't know what to think about this, besides that the thing they are selling has many many more qubits than 8, and the whole problem in quantum computation is scaling, ya dig?
The ones I find the most convincing are the ones that try to find a "signature" of quantum computation, by setting the system up with a certain connectivity that will cool down into certain ground states with certain probability iff it's quantum. I like these. There was one from Boixo, but I guess Vazirani's group at Berkeley figured out that this test wasn't good enough to differentiate. There was another, again, which Boixo is on, from Ronnow et. al. which came up with another signature, and they decided that it wasn't quantum.
If you've been doing superconducting qubits for a while, you notice that they're using a qubit design which even the inventor has abandoned at this point. If you're an experimental physicist, you notice that the whole thing is a poorly designed scientific experiment. If you're just a casual observer, and you listen to the language they use to describe their product, you notice that their wording is very slimy. I don't believe it's quantum.
I also think a room temperature annealer ASIC could be very, very cool. An analog computer sort of thing. Would LOVE to see this.
- kevingadd 13y agoInformative comment, thanks: By superconducting qubits I assume you're referring to a general approach for creating qubits that you can use for computation (I'm also assuming the 'superconducting' refers to getting some material into a superconducting state at which point the physical/quantum properties are useful). Is that right? And when you say the inventor has abandoned their qubit design, do you mean the person that came up with that particular approach? Or the credited inventor of the d-wave? Or something else? The small amount of stuff I've read examining their claims definitely made it seem like they were weasel-wording things, but I've never understood enough about quantum mechanics (or quantum computing) to attempt to examine them directly. Thanks. I hadn't realized that annealing could be done in an analog fashion - that's pretty cool. I can see how in that case an ASIC could actually dramatically outperform a digital model, then? Also, 'room temperature' - does the D-Wave have to be cooled to some absurdly low temperature to work? I can see how that would be necessary if it relies on superconductivity.
- vilhelm_s 13y ago> does the D-Wave have to be cooled to some absurdly low temperature to work? Yeah, 20 millikelvin. It's cooled with liquid Helium. (http://www.nas.nasa.gov/quantum/quantumcomp.html http://www.nas.nasa.gov/quantum/quantumcomp.html)
- selimthegrim 13y agoWait, they're selling the fact they have some avoided crossing as proof of adiabaticity? How stupid do they think we are? They don't provide any data on how it slows down?
- joe_the_user 13y agoIt's a bit like a company selling fusion reactors who puts their reactor in a car, and then races it, and when they kinda sorta beat their competitor, they say "clearly had to be fusion." Sure, it sound rather indirect but if you could put water in your car and beat competitors consistently, you'd be truly the best artist ever or have some energy-from-hydrogen scheme going on.