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Comment by benhamner | Hacker News Reader

This is an old article (from 2009). Hartmut Neven provided an update at ICML 2011 in the latter part of his keynote talk - http://techtalks.tv/talks/54457/

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You know, it's funny how ridiculous D-wave sounded when they insinuated they were scaling qubits about as fast as Moore's law, but here they are in 2011 with a 512 qubit chip that clearly works. That's nuts.

It's hard to believe our technology has advanced this far so fast.

Combined with technologies like IBM Watson, at this rate in 10 years we'll have no idea what the fuck our computers are even doing anymore.

Though one should be careful as the D-wave qubits aren't of the kind that produce a universal quantum computer AND I don't think anyone knows whether their current machines are scaling better than classical analogues.

You are correct, their QC is more of a hardware solver for a very specific problem than a general purpose computer. On scaling, I was a D-Wave a few weeks ago, they seem to be prepared to scale-up the chip aggressively in 2012.

I think one has to be careful about the engineering challenge of scaling (which I think D-wave has heroically succeeded at so far) versus the question of whether the adiabatic algorithms in their system (finite temperature, imperfections, etc) will scale. I think they can pull of the first challenge (again, an amazing accomplishment), but the second is a question of whether the physics and computer science of their device will scale. I think the good news is that they will probably be able to answer this question in the next few years (thanks to the purchase of one of their devices my Lockheed Martin), but I do worry the answer they get won't be the one they are hoping for.

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