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Comment by djrjfndnfhf | Hacker News Reader

Now this is starting to get interesting. 2000 qubits is where it starts being applicable to meaningful real-world combinatoric optimization problems. I would kill to have access to one of these machines for my research...

Edit: What's the beef?

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The "beef" is that, whatever your research is, you already have access to better, faster, cheaper tools. Unless your area of research is "D-Wave machines", I suppose! Otherwise the computer you typed this comment on is unquestionably better for your area of research than a D-wave machine, because it 1) can solve a thousand times more types of problems and 2) is much faster at the tiny set of problems D-wave machines can address.

This is interesting research in an interesting area; it's certainly not a scam. But it's also not what you seem to imagine, doesn't work like you're assuming, isn't useful for what you hope, and shows no signs of being headed in that direction. Yes, 2000 entangled qubits that could be used to solve arbitrary problems would be amazing, but D-Wave isn't making that, isn't claiming to be making that, and doesn't seem to be working on a way to make that.

I don't think you should be downvoted, but if you have a hard-on for spending a lot of money on a helium cooled computer for these problems, you'd be better off retrofitting a mid-level PC with helium cooling and overclocking it. Probably by an order of magnitude.

The search for good problems for the D-Wave (irrespective of whether anyone cares about their answers) is still on.

A search space that's 2^2000 big when each fitness function evaluation takes a few seconds is intractable on a conventional computer. The relative performance gain is exponential the more qubits you add, which is why this is the first interesting quantum computer (or quantum optimizer if you're being picky).

Yes, but you don't get to just input any optimization problem into the dwave. The problem is that the specific kind of optimization that the dwave can do (even ignoring the fact that the output doesn't correspond directly with a solution) hasn't been found to map to any problems classical computers are actually bad at.

If you really think the problems you work on are that novel and up the D-Wave's alley, I suggest you email one of the academic teams looking for problems that the D-Wave is good at. They've yet to find any.

That's not how quantum annealing works. This is a pretty good walk through expected and actual gains. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6231/215.full

I've never heard anyone claim it'd be exponential. In fact, there are proofs showing it can't be.

If your research is in breaking cryptography I'm sure the NSA would love to assist you. It's not like the NSA is hard pressed for cash.

Unfortunately the NSA doesn't do a lot of evolutionary structural optimization :/

Could a D-Wave be used to perform Shor's algorithm? I remember reading a long time ago that In-Q-Tel and an unnamed 3-letter agency had invested in D-Wave

It cannot. It can only run simulated annealing and return probabilistic results.

D-Wave's comp is useless for that.

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