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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

I believe in quantum computing in the long run, I took some graduate math classes on the subject in college; I'm at least passingly familiar with the principals, so the following isn't really coming from a totally un-informed perspective:

With regards to the D-Wave systems in particular, are these actually faster than solving the problems with a classical approach? There's no benchmarks, no numbers, nothing -- just a customer list. A customer list whose engineering offices want to look hip. I mean, VW, Accenture and Save-on-Foods? I can't help but feel like if it did anything even a hair better than classical computers, the customer list would include every FAANG.

D-Wave feels a bit like a blockchain company. Is it (better|faster)? Sir, it's got them magic of (qbits|blockchain)... I don't understand your question.

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> With regards to the D-Wave systems in particular, are these actually faster than solving the problems with a classical approach?

Obviously the answer to that is "No".

Google just did a "Quantum supremacy" experiment with lots of fanfare and some criticism that it really wasn't (details on that are complex). Quantum supremacy is exactly the thing you're asking for: Can we do something, anything at all, with a QC that we couldn't just do on average computers?

The important thing to realize is: Google did this with a very specific problem that was suitable for their quantum computer. It wasn't something that was practically useful. They chose a problem they could solve, nothing more. Noone has claimed to have run a quantum supremacy experiment on D-Wave.

My best guess is all their happy customers had a problem that needed to be solved, they solved it, and nobody asked if the "quantum" aspect was particularly relevant in it.

An important point about the technical meaning of "quantum supremacy": It is only the claim that a problem exists that can be solved on existing quantum computers and not on existing classical computers. The problem that Google used to demonstrate quantum supremacy has no practical uses, and no useful problem is known that can act as a witness for quantum supremacy. The practical implication: "Getting you problem solved" cannot be the motivation for buying quantum compute power from D-wave (unless you have no clue). Possible valid motations: "learning to work with quantum computers", "seeming cool", "donating money to companies that may build useful quantum computers in the future".

I thought the problem had some limited applications. Wasn't it something like modeling the quantum states of hydrogen?

That was a different test, that wasn’t trying to do something infeasible classically. The supremacy test was effectively solving a contrived combinatorics problem.

Thanks for the link, based on the reading I think I was walking whether there was a quantum advantage and it’s magnitude, although the quantum supremacy aspect is interesting too.

That's a press release, not a technical paper, so yeah, it's fairly lacking on technical details. Performance of quantum computers is rather difficult to summarize in an easily digestible measure, so press releases tend to cover the basics: a number of qubits, a degree of connectivity, etc. You might prefer a whitepaper[1] that does dig into some of the more technical performance details. (alas, it took me a couple of tries to find the paper as our webserver seems to be stumbling under load)

Our focus isn't on artificial benchmarks. Our approach is more pragmatic. We build the best hardware that we can today, and the best software stack around that we can, and we're building our business around getting better solutions into the hands of customers.

[1] https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/14-1049A-A_The_...

Do you have any case studies with partners?

There's a few out there; here's a couple that I'm familiar with.

https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/Dwave_Menten%20...

https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/Dwave_Groovenau...

There's quite a few technical reports by partners out there, as well.

https://www.dwavesys.com/resources/publications?type=externa...

> Our focus isn't on artificial benchmarks. Our approach is more pragmatic. We build the best hardware that we can today, and the best software stack around that we can, and we're building our business around getting better solutions into the hands of customers.

Speaking as a sysadmin, this reads like "our numbers are so hilariously bad, that we're trying to deprecate the concept of measurement."

So, tell me. Precisely what are your results on the "artificial benchmarks"? Something that someone with one of your boxes could verify.

Claim is that VW is using it to "calculate traffic flows" [0]. That sounds like the "traveling salesperson problem" that quantum is supposed to be good at [1].

0 https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/Dwave_Tech%20Ov...

1 https://medium.com/@michal.stechly/solving-the-traveling-sal...

Yeah, to my extremely limited understanding currently quantum algorithms are best for optimization problems in terms of obvious business value. Meaning their utilization does not need innovation, just a quantum compute platform to a known but currently intractable problem.

Old big companies with lots of logistics presumably have lots of logistics problems (optimization) they would not mind solving.

So I would expect the first customers of any relevant quantum stack to be the companies whose business depends on large scale physical, not the digital world. With problems that are already analyzed, but lack agreeable solution.

Hence FAANG are not necessarily the first clients.

The Quantum computer has to cost-effectively solve optimization problems cheaper than classical computers. Existing computers can handle large scale optimization problems especially with GPUs and/or cloud computing.

As other posters have called out, most early customers are probably just interested in getting a head start in understanding the tech and doing research now rather than too late.

Much new hyped tech is like this, a lot of people have fear of missing out in not starting too late on tech that will provide a business advantage, either execution wise or just brand wise (many people don't want to be the dinosaur, using no longer trendy tech).

They said that for 2-SAT problems, the new architecture (Pegasus) works better for hard problems, whereas for simpler problems the Chimera architecture is faster.

Surely you mean 3-SAT, because 2-SAT is trivial :-)

Save-on gave numbers: an optimization algorithm took 25 hours to run normally, now completes in 2 minutes.

I saw that, but... could they have optimized their classical code? Was it just a garbage batch script running single-threaded on a single-CPU machine backed by a MySQL SELECT * FROM query? Frequently these types of sweeping statements fall down with the slightest breeze.

I feel like you’re asking whether the model T can be fitted or at least compared with a car with a turbo. From the Dwave machine I’ve read about, its more the algorithm must be appropriate (analogous to) in a fundamental way to the quantum system annealed for the computation.

He is saying that. If the original algorithm was badly coded and they ran the least optimised variant ignoring all updates, then the QC version may indeed have been faster, but it depends: was it tuned to a specific problem, and is there a better than model-T classical computing algorithm for the same specific problem.

I'm genetically minded to be skeptical of QC. The question isn't outrageous, even for a believer.

The follow-on question is therefore, are they going to save more time in the long run by writing poorly optimised queries for a particular quantum hardware stack (that we assume as being easier/faster to write), rather than writing highly optimised queries on classical hardware.

Writing a garbage SQL query and getting it back faster might be worth it over optimising it - especially if the questions aren't regularly repeated.

If they had resources to throw at a quantum computer they have probably been throwing resources at trying to optimize for a while now and I'd assume lots of people have scratched their head trying to improve it on their own and get a promotion / applause / bonus.

It's either a problem that is hard to optimize or people lack the skills... though if they've managed to migrate to a quantum computer they probably have the skills necessary.

1500x is a impressive speedup (1500 min to 2 min)

Also - MYSQL SELECT is a I/O problem, bash scripts usually are not CPU problems... not the kind of things a quantum computer would even apply...

I cannot imagine that Save-on-foods IT has a culture of excellence. I'd love to be mistaken, but I doubt I am.

It's a very mediocre grocery store. I'm glad I don't see ads anymore because their marketing is always terrible. Their mascot is some guy named Darryl. Ugh I don't care for SOF. Their produce sucks too.

Until there is an undisputed demonstration of quantum supremacy [1], which at last check there isn't, then no, these (or any other quantum computer) is not faster than classical approaches.

The reasons companies are investing in these is R&D, or in more capitalist terms, FOMO: if quantum computing does turn out to offer an edge someday, you want to be able to make use of it fast, instead of scrambling to catch up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_supremacy

Quantum can be still be faster/more powerful per dollar than classical without achieving supremacy, right?

There are a lot of big problems that are tractable on classical, but if they become orders of magnitude cheaper on quantum, that's still a great win.

Usually this is termed “quantum advantage”, when it’s better than classical at some commercial metric that “matters”.

As far as I know, quantum supremacy has been unequivocally demonstrated, albeit not on a very interesting problem, and of course without solving the quantum error correction problem:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372

And noteworthy in regards to this thread: Not with a D-Wave computer.

As that article notes, IBM (which obviously has a dog in this fight) has strongly disputed Google's claims. I don't have enough expertise to judge.

Iirc IBM came up with an optimization of the classical algorithm (specifically using enormous but still (barely) practical amounts of RAM) that reduced the advantage of Google's quantum algorithm by an order of magnitude or two.

There was two issues with their argument though. First, they hadn't implemented it yet, which is rather ironic considering that Google's feat was in actually delivering an implementation. Second, Google's quantum computer is still orders of magnitude faster than IBM's optimized classical approach, not to mention cheaper.

Neither do I, but Scott Aaronson surely does, and he believes Google have unequivocally proved quantum supremacy. According to him, IBM has disputed the extent of the advantage proven by Google, but not the actual fact that they succeeded.

Some graduate math classes on the subject in college might make you familiar with the principles but you'd be better off doing some networking to become familiar with the principals.

Probably for a very specific problem, you can us dwave as a faster and cheaper alternative to classicals

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