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Comment by an_opabinia | Hacker News Reader

D-Wave is the original Theranos.

- They make bold claims that many people plainly say don't make sense, before seeing any evidence.

- They use hype to buy time to do scientific research.

- The successes of the D-Wave machine have the same characteristic p-hacking profile of Theranos's Edison machine. That is, try 200 problems, and find 1 that appears to work, which could just be due to chance.

- Apologists talk about "there are a lot of smart people working" there or blame "marketing," but who haven't seen the product and don't know any more than anyone else.

The main differences are (1) the lack of an enigmatic founder. (2) D-Wave publishes, and then in later analysis their claims don't hold up.

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Two major differences:

- D-Wave does seem to understand the criticisms and slowly incorporate them into each subsequent test. Theranos instead preferred ad hominem attacks on their attackers.

- The question about D-Wave isn't whether or not it works, it's about whether or not it is useful. Theranos couldn't even get their non-magic technology working right.

The question is how it works, and whether or not it works as advertised. In that sense, no it does not work.

I think this is an unfair comparison (and I have grave doubts of D-wave's "achievements"). People can actually buy the machines and play with them. I have credulous and doubting friends at google who play with/have played with google's D-wave.

Also Theranos explicitly went against the FDA (like 23andMe), while D-wave is going along the publication route.

Theranos was simply bogus (I wouldn't call it fraudulent, but definitely bogus). D-Wave is like many tech startups, some of which do end up panning out.

That is way overblown.

What they have is more akin to an analog computer, using quantum tricks to solve problems. The issue here is that most people disagree that this fits into the general definition of a "quantum computer".

That's not what Aaron is saying. He's saying there's no evidence that the D-Wave machine is using any quantum tricks to solve problems at all.

What would explain the interest Google, NASA and the DoD have in D-Wave and the fact that they have acquired a few of these devices?

Most of those organizations are happy to dump $1 million into something with so much potential power on the off-chance that it turns out to work. In fact, if I was in charge of Google, and understood the extremely tiny chance that D-Wave is legit, I would still dump in money, because the tiny chance it works still makes it worth it.

But they (in particular, Google) also have experts in quantum physics and computing on staff, so they're much better equipped than most to determine the validity of the claim.

The actual price for a D-Wave machine is more than $10M. It's a good sign that the first customers have continued their support by upgrading to the newer models.

As a taxpayer I'm glad those organizations buy these machines, just as they bought Connection Machines, Crays, etc. Some of those bets panned out. And in fact if that money went into nothing but more understanding of the difficulties of quantum computing wouldn't you be glad?

But I don't make the mistake of interpreting a purchase as some sort of endorsement. It's merely an endorsement that "your plausibility level is above our noise floor".

The DoD will give you a few thousand USD if you write a good enough proposal for the military benefits of sharks with freaking lasers on their heads for the defense of navy vessels [1].

Throwing a few million at a prototype computer on the off chance it works is well within the budget.

[1] Austin Power reference not a real research project.

We do however, since the 1940s, have dolphins with bombs.

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