World’s first commercial quantum computer sold to Lockheed Martin | Hacker News Reader

World’s first commercial quantum computer sold to Lockheed Martin

venturebeat.com

77 pointsmalvosenior31 comments

D-Wave has a long, long history of making grandiose claims and completely failing to back them up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Criticism

All this press release proves is that they got a defense contractor to spend $10 million dollars.

I agree. And the article just writes so much marketing gospel you have to wonder if they even understand what they're writing.

They've recently published a paper in Nature that shows an 8 qubit version of their adiabatic device really is a quantum computer so this is not complete bullshit anymore. We'll see what Lockheed says about the device. Maybe in the next few years a DWave will make a bigger quantum computer and we'll see if Lockheed keeps buying.

This looks like the 'real thing' although they've not yet figured out how to run, for example, Shor's algorithm on an adabiatic QC yet. Also 128 qubits is not enough to tackle problems intractable to current classical computers. And finally this device by DWave is hardwired to perform only one type of optimization search, it's not a 'general purpose' computer yet.

Actually, if you read the story, it says that they delivered one to Lockheed, and that the cost of a D-Wave one is 10m, not that Lockheed paid D-Wave 10m.

They might have, but this story isn't that conclusive.

I worked with someone who worked there. It's not all bullshit but one of the founders has got big dreams/plans and so comes off as a bullshit artist. Even my former colleague says he thought a lot of it was a little iffy but he never doubted they'd eventually get there. The stories were awesome.

i guess it's at least a step into sort of the right direction of quantum computing :)

The D-wave machine is different from a general purpose quantum computer which is why it can have many more qubits than the more traditional approach that you are most like to have heard of in the press. That said no one knows what the power of this type of machine is and calling in a quantum computer is probably stretching it a bit. Here are some details for those interested: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-D-Wave-One-a-true-quantum-comput...

Two months ago we had a story that 14 qubits was the largest quantum computer yet (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404470). This one now has 128? Is this just a money difference, was this a huge engineering breakthrough, or is there something else going on here?

There's something else going on here. The one-line explanation is that true QC requires quantum entanglement to be preserved, for reasonably long time scales, across all qubits. It's not believed that the D-Wave 128-bit machine does this, although the 8-bit one seems to.

Here's the opinion of an independent critic:

http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-pr...

I'd love to know how many people in the world actually understand quantum computing with reasonable depth. My bet is less than 500. I will be the first to confess that I have no idea what they are talking about most of the time.

Here are a couple of articles on the announcement by Scott Aaronson and Dave Bacon (professors at MIT and U Washington).

http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-pr...

http://www.quora.com/Is-the-D-Wave-One-a-true-quantum-comput...

Scott Aaronson is basically THE go-to guy for anything involving complexity theory or quantum computing. His explanations are phenomenal and his blog is usually full of easily understood information. He posted something a few weeks ago about the D-wave situation and pointed to that article he did for Forbes.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=639

I wouldn't say Aaronson is the premier expert on computational complexity. That would probably be Lance Fortnow who literally writes the blog on computational complexity (http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/). RJ Lipton is pretty notable, as well http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/.

He didn't suggest Aaronson was the premier expert, he suggested he was the best person to go to for clear, easy to understand explanations (such as in the Forbes piece linked).

These are completely different things.

In that vein, I highly recommend his lectures titled "Quantum Computing Since Democritus". His notes are amazingly written: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ and largely cover complexity theory from the ground up (not just quantum computing as the title suggests). His lecture on the Anthropic Principle also makes interesting reading.

The worldwide community of quantum computing researchers is probably around a couple thousand.

p.s. your namesake is one of them http://arxiv.org/find/quant-ph/1/au:+Cross_A/0/1/0/all/0/1

This kind of sounds like bs. For several years now quantum computers have had a very low number of qubits, only incrementally increasing every once and a while. Now this thing nearly 10x the qubits? I don't think so, such a breakthrough would make much more news than this.

This could pose a problem to the BitCoin money supply.

Want to know if these quantum computers have any Operating system and what Programing languages are used to build the programs

This particular device is only wired to do one kind of optimization search - basically it does a variant of the 'traveling salesman' shortest route search. There's no OS or programming language, it's just an 'oracle' device. You set the states of the qubits via the inputs, let it 'run' for a bit and then you read the results.

So, it's more like an expensive ASIC and not a general-purpose computer?

"I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

That's like hearing about a faster-than-light spaceship and asking about what kind of seats it has.

Don't be a jackass. It's a much more minor mistake to assume extra similarities between conventional and quantum computers than to assume that computers are effective magic.

Its OS is built with alien technology (aka LISP)

http://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/learning-to-program-th...

Good to see this type news being shared publicly. What ever happened to Bob Gelfond & MagiQ?

Still alive and kicking. There are also a few other quantum cryptograph companies around including http://www.idquantique.com/ and http://www.quintessencelabs.com/

The real kicker is programming it with punch cards.

It's hard because you need quantum punch cards.

I have a feeling this will become a ThinkGeek product.

wasn't D-wave a scam company?

There are lots of people questioning whether their device is really a quantum computer but D-Wave has published many papers in peer-reviewed literature and so just calling them a 'scam company' is a bit strong. We'll see soon enough once more people get their hands on these devices. If they really are a 'scam company' they won't last long now that they're shipping actual hardware.

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