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Comment by QCman | Hacker News Reader

Here's the list of D-Wave supporters (organizations that have spent real $): Google, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Labs, University of Southern California, Temporal Defense Systems, US government, CIA/In-Q-Tel. At over $10M per machine, this adds up to at least $60M. Surely the critics in this blog are missing something.

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Several of the above investors have a well-known history of investing in extreme, improbable avenues of development; whether the idea is that "we've got vast hordes of money—in many cases, other people's money who don't demand much accountability—and if we get lucky one in ten thousand times, that's potentially enough to justify it", or "even if this fails, it might have some side benefits", or, "just by investing in this, we force our adversaries to try spend resources trying to figure if we know something critical that they don't", or some combination, is less clear. But I wouldn't take small investments from those players (and the scale we are talking is small for them) as a sign of probable success.

Yet there are few people alive more qualified to comment on this type of work than Scott Aaronson. Plus, most of his criticism is only directed towards the misleading marketing, journalism, and presentations about D-Wave projects.

How many of those use the D-WAVE machine in production?

Zero.

Everyone are just trying to work out if they can use it for something - anything. So far the answer is NO.

Several universities and corporations have QC R&D projects (eg. Alibaba, Google, IBM, Microsoft); none of these corporations have customers for their QCs.

Wait till you see the list of respected Enron and Theranos supporters...

Do you have information not available to the organizations that have spent over $60M on D-Wave computers? Why are you wasting your time here?

>Why are you wasting your time here?

Because I like reading arguments from authority -- especially ones based on the premise that major organizations never buy into BS.

Which I guess explains why software sold to enterprises is known for its quality and utility.

OK, but that doesn't explain why D-Wave has so many paying customers (Google, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Labs, University of Southern California, Temporal Defense Systems, US government, CIA/In-Q-Tel).

Even if one insists on "argument from authority", paying customers means nothing.

Satisfied customers, now, that's a whole other thing.

Repeating that list in your response doesn't underscore your point, it instead emphasizes how little you have to add in rebuttal.

Argument from authority, really?

It seems to be more argument from money spent. Which is equally fallacious, if less likely to show up on a standard list of fallacies.

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