It's official, it seems: the D-Wave isn't a “real” quantum computer, but it does handle some classes of problems a lot faster than a classical desktop computer. That's the result of the first attempt to benchmark the company's adibiatic quantum computer, but it comes with caveats. But first, some background. D-Wave is a …

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Wednesday 15th May 2013 00:48 GMT as2003

If a public company is having this success, can we assume that certain shadier (government) organisations are already ahead of the game and are routinely cracking public key cryptography?

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1. Wednesday 15th May 2013 02:18 GMT Destroy All Monsters
  
  No we can't because this isn't a quantum computer, it's an analog computer doing annealing problems which does not help in factorization at all.
  
  something quantum-like is happening in the D-Wave
  
  Sounds like a sprinkle of magic dust from the sales department. If "something quantum-like" is happening, what is it? What is the Hamiltonian? Where are the undead cats?
  
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  1. Wednesday 15th May 2013 02:29 GMT Destroy All Monsters
    
    Note also that
    
    The tests were run on various problems that fall into the NP-Hard category
    
    sounds fishy this context - Quantum computers are NOT better than classical computers at solving (i.e. finding the best solution to) those kind of problems. However, optimization algorithms (and specially designed analog computers) may more quickly find a approximate solution, though not the optimal one. A good chunk of the "neural network" computers do that kind of optimization. Of course, there are problems in which even finding an approximately good solution is unfeasible.
    
    Maybe one should write
    
    something neural-network-like is happening in the D-Wave
    
    but that's too 80s.
    
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2. Wednesday 15th May 2013 06:24 GMT Christian Berger
  
  In general
  
  If a company or an individual claims some scientific breakthrough, it's safe to expect it's a hoax. Companies only very rarely provide an environment to foster innovation. Although it may be possible for a company to have a breakthrough, it's very unlikely that they research in that direction and are able to research.
  
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