D-Wave quantum annealers solve problems classical algorithms struggle with | Hacker News Reader

D-Wave quantum annealers solve problems classical algorithms struggle with

arstechnica.com

13 pointsrbanffy13 comments

I get the impression that all these quantum computing "results" are actually just quantum experiments dictated by the hardware and they don't have enough degrees of freedom in the system to control it enough to be called a computer.

And of course simulating a complex quantum system classically is intractable, so the comparison to classical computers is deceptive.

It is exactly because simulating quantum phenomena on a classical computer is so difficult that the comparison makes sense.

This is 100% it.

D-Wave is great at solving issues that directly map to what it is physically solving i.e approximating the state of lowest energy of some entangled (sparse) lattice with fixed topology.

The point is, what if certain problems can be mapped to it such that business value could come out of it?

So far this hasn't been a thing, but at least it can do something non-trivial. There's no other quantum computing device that is as close to attaining real-world usefulness than D-Wave.

Like other quantum supremacy claims, it cannot be proved by others.

"It works on my computer" is actually an ok claim when you have only one computer of that type

Not just one, though. We've sold a few to customers, not to mention the computers in our Burnaby lab that you can easily access through our cloud service.

It must be tiring to wade through the comments on these topics.

If I felt obliged to correct every single misconception I read here, it certainly would be tiring. Instead, I generally allow myself one comment and maybe a response. And that's not limited to work-related posts; it's how I budget social media.

Sage advice. If I may ask, what do you do at D-Wave? Do you ever think of switching to working on gate-based systems?

When you check the results change

I'm mostly just waiting for Scott Aaronson to tell me any of these sorts of claims are true

In other news: Blending a newspaper outperforms a "classical" computer simulating blending a newspaper.

dw;dr

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