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Comment by eoinmurray92 | Hacker News Reader

You are correct that they seem to have not yet built a proper adiabatic quantum computer (aren't even trying/capable of building a universal one). However I do think that the press around them is good for quantum computing in general.

I work trying to make the early stages of a qcomputer using semiconductor quantum dots and I definitely think that the press around DWave is helpful.

Firstly they are showing that there is a well defined commercial interest in such a computer. I also think that they are paving the path that other such companies will take in the future.

But yeah I agree, they have not yet shown much in terms of a real, useful quantum computer. There is a lot of unjustified hype in the technology, but at the same time I think its useful for this hype to exist for the q-tech industry in general.

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I do not think that the press from D-Wave is good for quantum computing in general. For this reason:

" I predict that the very same people now hyping D-Wave will turn around and—without the slightest acknowledgment of error on their part—declare that the entire field of quantum computing has now been unmasked as a mirage, a scam, and a chimera." - Scott Aaronson

If D-Wave fails it will cause at least a decade of non existent funding to QC in general because it will be reduced to the level of cold fusion in the press.

So basically, D-Wave are working hard to make sure there will be a Quantum Computing Winter, two decades of darkness and cold for QC researchers before the field can eventually get going again.

Looks that way. They even wrote their machine's OS in Lisp, or so I hear, which probably doesn't bear directly on the question at hand but is certainly suggestive as anything.

This is FUD.

There are some system utilities written in Lisp by one of the devs, but there is nothing like an OS written in Lisp. It's the same as saying that Linux is written in Haskell because of Xmonad.

And by the way, spreading stupid gossips like this is very suggestive on certain individual's intents.

Good to know; I haven't been able to find a lot of detail on the subject of how D-Wave uses Lisp, so I was just repeating what I've heard, which I concede I probably shouldn't have done.

(And I'm a Lisp hacker myself, so I'm not really interested in attempting to further wreck the reputation of that language family; indeed, I'm delighted to see projects like Clojure beginning to resurrect said reputation, and the only way I could be happier about that would be if Clojure did a better job living up to its predecessors.)

from 2011

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

> The main processor doesn’t run an OS in the sense you’re thinking of. The OS is written in LISP and isn’t exposed to developers at this point.

> No, but the APIs we’ve got are basically wrappers around lisp, so it would be easy to make one. Just figured the number of lisp coders out there was probably pretty small.

Interesting. I must admit I was badly misinformed on the role of Lisp in this project. My apologies.

The info is pretty sketchy and three years old.

Strong disagree, it's the AI story all over again. This will poison the field.

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