It's far from a glass bead game. Just because you and I don't know how to make an annealer do something useful doesn't mean others aren't already getting exciting and useful results from it.
FWIIW I use annealing all the time in non-gradient optimization problems. My X220 thinkpad from 2012 is faster than d-wave's thing.
The only interesting quantum computer is one which achieves actual quantum supremacy. There's a really obvious reason why this will never happen (well really obvious to me). It's the same reason you can't solve NP-hard problems using soap bubbles.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/the-u...
The article you link to doesn't mention D-Wave.
It links to a more detailed summary[1] which does reference D-Wave, but it happens in a curious way.
> While various strategies for building quantum computers are now being explored, an approach that many people consider the most promising, initially undertaken by the Canadian company D-Wave Systems and now being pursued by IBM, Google, Microsoft, and others...
> On the hardware front, advanced research is under way, with a 49-qubit chip (Intel), a 50-qubit chip (IBM), and a 72-qubit chip (Google) having recently been fabricated and studied. The eventual outcome of this activity is not entirely clear, especially because these companies have not revealed the details of their work.
Very curious indeed; they mention D-Wave in passing, but don't mention the pesky 2000 qubit machine that Google & NASA have bought and analyzed in peer-reviewed journals. They go on to list some vaporware, presenting a narrative that the entire industry is vaporware. D-Wave doesn't fit the narrative, and it was omitted.
Even curiouser, Rigetti has made their own quantum computer, and they beat D-Wave to a public cloud offering -- doesn't fit the vaporware narrative, didn't make the list. I'm accustomed to seeing bias towards gate-model in discussion of QC efforts, but Rigetti's erasure is very curious indeed.
Of course, I'm accustomed to getting downvoted whenever I speak of D-Wave or adiabatic QC. Since the computational models are equivalent[2], I might go so far as call that a religious stance. But there's one issue with gate model; it needs error correction to scale, and NOBODY implements it. IBM has a cute proof that shallow circuits can show advantage on certain problems, but the problems are just as "real-world" as Google's billion-times-speedup using D-Wave hardware: there's no evidence you'd see that performance solving a problem you need an answer to.
So my question for you, a person with experience in simulated annealing algorithms who claims equivalence with D-Wave's hardware: do you know the difference between adiabatic evolution[3] and the annealing that you're simulating?
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-case-agains...
[2] https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-adiabatic-and-quantum-cir... (and... their adiabatic model is just as possible as error-corrected gates right now)
I know about Rigetti; same adjective. I've been yacking with Dyakonov and other such people, as I'm writing a long, long thing on the topic.
Yeah, OK, the National Academy of Sciences has put together a panel of quantum computing guys who came to the conclusion that building actual quantum computers in the near future is unlikely: must be a conspiracy!
Can normal people sign up and immediately get QPU time, API access, etc? The D-Wave offering is much more complete, I think.
FWIIW there are 0 error corrected qubits in the history of the human race so far. Might happen some day! Kinda funny how regular digital computers didn't have such problems as not existing in the world, even in the very early days.