I'm going to have to ask you to expand on this comment and provide some context for why you think they're "scam geniuses"?
It's hard to think of a reason to refuse to publicly prove that your quantum computer is actually working if it really is, if it isn't it makes a lot of sense of course.
Concerning the purchases of Google and the US government: These are probably more like research grants for D-Wave, as the buyers expect that at some time there might come a working quantum computer from D-Wave, and buying a prototype (even a faulty one) puts them in a good position to be the first to actually get a working version, while helping the company to stay afloat. By the way, Google invested 200 million USD in a different quantum computing technology endeavour led by a UC Santa Barbara professor, which would make little sense if they already had a working quantum computer.
The value of D-Wave as a company is not only defined by their ability to build a working quantum computer though, as there could be significant value in the patent portfolio they built / acquired and in their expertise in building and assembling superconducting chips and systems, which are both highly non-trivial tasks.
Their way of communicating with the public is of course highly misleading, which is why many people in the scientific community have very little respect for them, as this is viewed as highly unethical and harmful behavior in science (but not necessarily in the business world).
[0] http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/publications.shtm... [1] https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/quantum-annealing-wi...
The quantum annealing example from the Google research blog seems to use normal quantum gates to simulate the nearest-neighbor interactions in a spin chain. The nature article is currently down but it seems they use "Trotterization" to simulate the spin chain using one- and two-qubits gates.
And I didn't touch on your earlier (erroneous) comment on the scientific community's perception of D-Wave, but I think it needs to be said that in actual professional circles the research they're performing isn't met with as much derision as they seem to garner in these more causally informed settings. It's hyped and a difficult subject to understand, so that's fair, but I suggest really informing yourself if you're going to go out there and make the claims you're making.
[0] http://research.google.com/pubs/pub44292.html [1] https://aqccreg2016.eventfarm.com/events/index/7fff5387-0000... http://1qbit.com/insights-inside-googles-annual-adiabatic-qu... [2] (Another article reviewing QA with Martinis and team) http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02206
Again, their digital adiabatic quantum computing relies on a gate-based quantum processor, which provides a universal set of qubits gates and thus can in principle simulate any Hamiltonian, quantum annealing is just an algorithm that runs on it.
And I don't want to be overly negative, but the perception of D-Wave in "more professional" circles was not very enthusiastic in my experience, which to a large extent is also D-Waves fault.
Yes it is.
Lots of pure research goes nowhere. It's not like Geordie is defrauding the old and disabled. He's working with really really really smart people with lots of money.
Honestly, we need more of this and less of SnapChat startups.
Because there is no reliable way to fund it. Said another way, the time horizon for repayment is too long and too risky for traditional, non-corporate, non-public investing.
Lets assume you have a breakthrough with research, now you have to make a product to sell. Which means you need to likely build a new market, or even in the best case of an existing market change the team composition to fund product development.
Those are all risks that Banks and Venture Money (except in very rare cases) aren't willing to take.
What's harmful (IMHO) is making spectacular claims (look we have a working quantum computer!) and then not back them up by evidence. It is of course okay to sell your product aggressively as a startup, and sometimes to oversell it as well (fake it until you can make it), but I really have my doubts that D-Wave can "make it" in the near future, as there are just so many difficult problems to solve for which we don't even have a viabe approach yet (e.g building large scale qubit coupling schemes), and trust me most quantum computing research groups have people that are at least as smart and dedicated as the people working at D-Wave.