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D Wave has been iterating on their flagship machine for a few years now. The big argument is if entanglement is happening on a large enough scale in their syste

D Wave has been iterating on their flagship machine for a few years now. The big argument is if entanglement is happening on a large enough scale in their system to enable the scaling laws that they claim they'll be able to hit. You can find plots floating around where they extrapolate to having a computer more powerful than a classical computer the size of the universe in ~2020. Right now it's barely comparable with a rack of servers IIRC, but the big claim is that quantum power scales much faster than classical power with number of bits (exponential vs linear) when full entanglement is achieved. I'm under the impression that the Googles and Boings and NASAs of the world want to get their feet wet in the field despite its infancy. It's a good effort at any rate. There's a lot of strong negativity around DWave, which I find strange, given that it's existence isn't personally inconveniencing their critics in any way. If adiabatic quantum computing works it will really speed up the future tech timeline, so it's worth the effort.

makomk 12y ago
Last I heard, it wasn't even any faster than a mid-range desktop PC at the class of problems it was optimised to solve most efficiently. Has this improved since then?
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  I think so, but not super significantly. I don't think that's so much the point though - the claim is that they'll scale much faster than moore's law. Given the likely end of moore's law, this is a pretty big deal. So even if they're mediocre now the claim is that they could be amazing in 5-10 years.
VLM 12y ago
"I'm under the impression that the Googles and Boings and NASAs of the world want to get their feet wet in the field despite its infancy." And note this is invariably trumpeted loudly as in current production commercial end user applications. There are obvious financial / stock market reasons for these wild claims. But if you clear away the PR haze, the field is actually in the earliest research mode. By computer analogy, whats going on in reality is the first ENIAC has been partially wired although it doesn't work perfectly and may in fact never meet its goals and may or may not ever have any direct effect on anyone, although existing unit record equipment manufacturers are watching nervously. The analogy of whats being presented by PR as a completed accomplishment is Zilog having shipped their fifty millionth Z80 processor and the living rooms of America are stuffed with "1980s home computers" which pretty much did have at least some effect on everyone alive either then or later.
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  Yeah, the PR is pretty extreme. I like to think that this is more for public buzz and doesn't affect the decision makers, so I sort of disregard it.

makomk 12y ago

Last I heard, it wasn't even any faster than a mid-range desktop PC at the class of problems it was optimised to solve most efficiently. Has this improved since then?

TTPrograms 12y ago
I think so, but not super significantly. I don't think that's so much the point though - the claim is that they'll scale much faster than moore's law. Given the likely end of moore's law, this is a pretty big deal. So even if they're mediocre now the claim is that they could be amazing in 5-10 years.

VLM 12y ago

"I'm under the impression that the Googles and Boings and NASAs of the world want to get their feet wet in the field despite its infancy." And note this is invariably trumpeted loudly as in current production commercial end user applications. There are obvious financial / stock market reasons for these wild claims. But if you clear away the PR haze, the field is actually in the earliest research mode. By computer analogy, whats going on in reality is the first ENIAC has been partially wired although it doesn't work perfectly and may in fact never meet its goals and may or may not ever have any direct effect on anyone, although existing unit record equipment manufacturers are watching nervously. The analogy of whats being presented by PR as a completed accomplishment is Zilog having shipped their fifty millionth Z80 processor and the living rooms of America are stuffed with "1980s home computers" which pretty much did have at least some effect on everyone alive either then or later.

TTPrograms 12y ago
Yeah, the PR is pretty extreme. I like to think that this is more for public buzz and doesn't affect the decision makers, so I sort of disregard it.