efangs

People above are right about parallelization not being a useful benchmark.

On the other hand, benchmarking against other special purpose hardware (like an FPGA, ASIC, RQL, etc.) is definitely of interest.

Quantum annealing could "potentially" provide a speedup for any optimization problem that can be reduced to a spin Ising form, particularly quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO).

Notice the emphasis on potentially, though. This paper only shows that 1) for a particular class of problems the quantum annealer has constant speedup over one current classical algorithms, and 2) the quantum annealer scales better for number partitioning than a few current classical algorithms.

This ad lost me at "Dave Matthews Band".

First off, this is not a "quantum computer" as defined by the field. Instead it is a "quantum annealer" that relies on the quantum adiabatic theorem, though it's pretty clear it is impossible for these spins devices to remain completely adiabatic.

They look at mostly combinatorial optimization problems, and largely they can not do anything faster than a classical (non-quantum) computer (i.e. a single laptop).

I read in future versions they may embed classical chips into their D-wave black box. Benchmarks at that point will be sort of silly.

Awesome!

Hi, I like the site and idea. I was wondering if you were thinking of taking it one step further, however, and making it an actual pre-print server?

I would think that if you expect people to take the "credit for reviewing" model seriously, then likewise they should take seriously the notion of "credit for being reviewed" or "credit for being upvoted".

Also, there would have to be a way to verify submitters/reviewers credentials (e.g. connection to a research institution). Obvious arXiv has a model for how this could be done.

The implementation of their ideas can be found here: http://www.lib-res.org/.

I have to say that I am essentially 100% in line with their views on how the peer review system should be structured. However, the site, for lack of better words, sucks. It is slow, buggy, and poorly designed. What researchers actually WANT is the simplicity of arxiv.org with a login feature and peer-reviewed commenting.

Another group has another attempt here: https://publons.com. The website is much cleaner and better functioning, however, their idea is that peer-review may or may not be made public. It is mostly for people who want recognition for their peer review work.

I wish they would just team up, implement the ideas of the first group with the coding and design talent of the second.

"Unexpected" for a very good reason: it violates conservation of momentum, and is likely flawed. See http://space.io9.com/a-new-thruster-pushes-against-virtual-p....