D-Wave: 'Whether or not it's quantum, it's faster'

Re: Reverse Psychology Marketing

Well quantum computing wouldn't just be a buzzword. It _would_ be a major breakthrough much larger than anything we had before.

Essentially they sidestep the question whether they are a fraud or deserve a Nobel prize. This is a very important questions, since a commercial company having developed quantum computing would mean that the NSA has it for decades... however the scientific community at large would also have had it for a decade.

Re: D-Wave processors are like GPUs

D-Wave's current product cannot, in principle, implement Shor's algorithm due to the limitations of their implementation (or "implementation").

Not that working D-Wave device would not be useful if it would actually work (and by saying "work", I mean work as in "outclass classical algorithms"), but breaking public key cryptography would not be one of the problems this device would perform.

In any case, it looks like these guys are not even there - for years they seem to be moving the goalposts when it comes to benchmark metrics and to this day still struggle to even prove the device is actually performing quantum computation. To me it looks like they gave up on the comparing the speed with state-of-the-art classical computers, I remember a year or so ago they were using single threaded classical implementation as a reference (I can only guess if this was the only "crippling" done), now even this is off the table. Not that this would be a problem in itself, even if the first quantum implementation would be slower than "state of the art" classical implementation, it would still be huge and more than worth pursuing, as it is often the case that the early versions of new technologies are less efficient than the current state-of-the-art. No, the problem is - they seem to be constantly moving the goalposts.

I would very much like to be wrong in this case, but to a complete outsider like myself, their behavior awfully looks like trying to sell the hype. I apologize to the honest hard working scientists and engineers who probably invested millions of man-hours and sleepless nights working for this company, but something just smells fishy with regards to the company's outside behavior.

This is to be expected, I guess - as with every big "new thing" in IT, there is a lot of hype and PR spin. Quantum computing is not exactly "new" at least as a concept, but the actual working implementation which can solve real-world problems faster than classical computing would be absolutely huge, probably the biggest technological jump since the first computer.

So, yes, the whole thing is big. But I am not sure if these guys will be the pioneers.

Again, I would like to be wrong but everything so far points more to attempts to hype their way out of investment losses than actual progress :(

Re: D-Wave processors are like GPUs

I'm not even convinced they've done as much as that. See this quote near the end:

"two and fifteen times faster than “the best competing software (at largest problem sizes), for all but one of input class that we tested”"

They say it performs better than competing software, not hardware. And even then only sometimes. Far from being some sort of new dedicated hardware that's good at a particular task, it sounds more like a regular CPU that happens to be running some slightly better optimised software.