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Comment by kensai | Hacker News Reader

So the high profile customers (US government among them) have fallen for some tech con artists, right?

This is a common fallacy. The US government is not that great at decision making actually. Mistakes abound and not just tiny mistakes but mistakes that consistently cost billions. The history of the fighter jet program is quite interesting in that regard. The healthcare.gov debacle is another recent example. I mean this isn't a ding against the government. Any large enough organization is terrible at making good decisions consistently. So just because the government and some other high profile people have invested in d-wave doesn't lend them any more credibility in my opinion.

The other high profile guys I'm assuming you mean are Google and IBM. It would be interesting to know how d-wave "quantum computers" have actually made any kind of dent in their respective companies other than pure marketing hype so that they can say they have "quantum computers".

It's perfectly reasonable for a large organization like some part of the USG or Google or IBM to simply buy one to see what it's like. If there actually is a there there (perhaps even one not known to the developers) they can learn something. And if there's something real (even if not useful) they can gain a leg up on users of the next generation system, perhaps from a different company who actually does know what they're doing.

And if it is a flop, well, the marginal cost is pretty minor. When I was at MIT we bought all sorts of crazy things some of which turned out to be useful in unexpected ways once you actually had the equipment in your hands.

A good example of this was the EmDrive which really seemed like a scam to me but might have a there there. I wouldn't have believed it at all except that NASA, a seemingly independent organization where this is concerned, saw enough that it's apparently worth looking further. If it had been the 100% scam I assumed (and that's still not clear) I'd still be OK with the money spent.

At the moment I still don't believe D-Wave and dinnertime discussions with friends at Google have not caused me to change my opinion.

That's fine. I don't disagree with that approach. What I find faulty is the incorrect reasoning applied based on that behavior. It is suspiciously close to appealing to authority type of argument. Just because a large organization takes a chance on something doesn't mean there was actual planning involved in the process other than as you said "let's just see how this pans out".

If they actually made that policy, that they will buy any <500k widget that promises the world, then I bet the market could churn out pseudoscience at astonishing rates.

The market already churns out an astonishing amount of pseudoscience. You don't need any special policies from big corporations for that. Magical thinking is one of those human things that seems to be deeply ingrained and requires sustained effort, practice, and training to avoid. Science and scientific thinking does not happen on its own. No one is born a scientist.

Whenever D-Wave comes up on HN I'm always impressed to see how many posters who casually read one Scott Aaronson blog (not even the most recent ones mind you) think they're more qualified than legions of classically trained engineers and physicists from Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, ETH Zurich, MIT Lincoln Lab, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Google, et. al.

D-wave isn't selling a "universal" quantum computer, but the platform they are and have continued to deliver has shown real, tangible progress with respect to quantum tunneling (even though their coverage has been typically questionable, the best layman's explanation of their most recent results happens to be from Ars [0]). No we're not getting a "universal" quantum computer anytime soon and no they're never going to be accessible to average consumers (so remain skeptical of anyone who says otherwise) but those claiming D-Wave is a scam/con are absurd.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/is-d-waves-quantum-pr...

All modern computers are based on quantum effects, but Intel does not call it's i7 CPU a quantum computer. The D-Wave really does not fit the established criteria for a quantum computer.

However, they really want the publicity from calling it a quantum computer so they continue to do so.

There was also problem where the speedup might have happen with classical computing. They were comparing their algorithm for their architecture against a single CPU implementation done same way in one paper. I've seen FPGA's get 3 digit speedups on problems they could brute force when redone for their architecture. Something the size and cost of D-Wave machine could easily use something like FPGA's, ASIC's, and/or NUMA links. I'm not sure it would achieve the exact results but I'd like it ruled out that they didn't build a MPP of ASIC's for the specific problem.

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