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Comment by cirgue | Hacker News Reader

I know next to nothing about quantum computing, but something about this seems extremely fishy. Had they developed a working quantum processor, would they not have publicized its capabilities far and wide before releasing an enterprise API? Failing at that, would there not be a benchmarks page that demonstrates the capabilities of this system? Could someone better acquainted with this technology weigh in?

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It's mostly marketing at this point.

Even if their quantum computers work, at the scale they operate today everything they do will also be doable by simulating a quantum computer on an average PC with some slowdown. It's just "now we can do it on a real quantum computer".

They would have to rapidly increase the bit number to produce anything that's useful. That may very well happen in the future, but nobody knows for sure.

Indeed, someone spends what AFAICT is a very small amount of his time debunking every last claim that any given quantum computer does anything straightforward simulated annealing can't do.

Not any given quantum computer -- Scott Aaronson debunks the D-Wave "quantum" annealers that aren't actually shown to be harnessing the quantum power.

IBM's machine by contrast is a genuine quantum computer -- the kind Scott Aaronson would probably have no problem with. But the number of qubits is too tiny to do anything interesting.

Scott Aaronson?

Sounds right.

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