
D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service - jonbaer
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/dwave-launches-free-quantum-cloud-service?href=
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doitLP
Last I knew (a few months ago) we were somewhere less than 20 qubits and
getting a straight answer on “does it work” depended on who was being
interviewed. How do they have a 2048 qubit chip? And why is it a binary
multiple? Did I miss some announcement?

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gaze
At best, d-wave is making an adiabatic quantum computer, not a gate based
quantum computer, at worst (most likely), they're a scam.

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core-questions
It doesn't look like a scam. When you sign up, you get an API key, and you can
get an SDK and submit problems to it.

I'm not enough of a mathematician to be able to formulate anything, but
there's a growing list of people that have been able to get useful results
from it.

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Dylan16807
No one questions its ability to do some amount of math. The doubt is in how it
scales.

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sigmaprimus
Lots of questions about "is this real or a scam", "what's it good for",
"what's the difference between this and a true QC". Well...

I have signed up for this, I know very little about the nath, the theory etc.
I'm not a computer scientist but apperantly that is what they want, they want
people that will come at quantum computing with little to no previous
knowledge and come at it with a different point of view..in particular they
are hoping for the "killer app". I figure if the Kardashians can get ritch off
the internet without knowing one line of code, maybe I have a shot with this!

It will cost me nothing but a bit of time and at the very least I will gain a
bit of experience from it. I have not spent much time on it but have watched a
few of their videos and they seem to explain things a bit better than the
regular "both 0 and 1" crap most people spew.

Here are two links to their videos that cover a lot of the questions asked in
this thread.

I say keep an open mind and give it a shot, don't let the nay sayers make you
miss out on something that could be a great opportunity.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_3470308...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_3470308643&src_vid=UV_RlCAc5Zs&v=zvfkXjzzYOo&feature=iv)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_2178338...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_2178338285&v=UV_RlCAc5Zs&feature=iv&src_vid=zvfkXjzzYOo)

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microtherion
> I figure if the Kardashians can get ritch off the internet without knowing
> one line of code, maybe I have a shot with this!

Promise me that if you DO strike it rich with quantum computing, you'll change
your name to "Hadamard Kardashian"!

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microtherion
So is this actually useful for anything practical? Even with my limited
understanding of the state of the art, I'm pretty sure that "factoring large
numbers in milliseconds" is not actually something that D-Wave machines can
do.

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lallysingh
The nice thing that the uncertainty of what they do can be resolved now.

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lovemenot
The superposition of D-Wave's states has collapsed?

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gog-ma-gog
To my knowledge, there are still no tasks a D-Wave is better at
(asymptotically) than a classical machine

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johncolanduoni
Last time I checked they haven't even beaten semi-recent laptops in direct
comparisons of execution time, even for very synthetic problems.

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core-questions
Probably true, but in some ways it's not a fair comparison - since the field
is only 20-30 years old, it's not surprising the offerings are comparable to
something in the earlier ages of computing. Many kinds of mechanisms that
seemed esoteric at their origin (e.g. the primitive but groundbreaking neural
networking of the Perceptron) have become everyday reality for us decades
later.

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timClicks
OT perhaps, but there's quite a good introduction to quantum computing by one
of Rigetti's engineers at the Bay Area Rust meetup online:
[https://youtu.be/mrJWpQMx2yo?t=119](https://youtu.be/mrJWpQMx2yo?t=119)

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amingilani
Here's the sign up link:
[https://cloud.dwavesys.com/leap/signup/](https://cloud.dwavesys.com/leap/signup/)

Things to note:

* You have to scroll to the bottom of the agreement to activate the checkbox, which activates the sign up button

* You have to be (or say you are) in the US

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james1234
I appreciate their service. But, is quantum computing going to be costly for
dedicated use ($2000/hour)? I hope someone is working on providing a quantum
computing service that is cheaper.

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core-questions
Keep in mind that that is an hour block of processing time. If a job only
takes a few microseconds, that's a lot of jobs, and you don't have to (nor
would you be able to) execute them in just one contiguous hour. You'd spread
it out over a month as you refine your processes.

If you're in an industry that hopes to be able to get value from these
machines one day, $2k is cheap.

If you're just a hobbyist, the minute or two of time they give you is enough
to get started, and if you're good at it, you could probably arrange with one
of the universities or national laboratories that have their own machine to
get some time on there.

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Abishek_Muthian
Has anyone compared the terms of these quantum cloud services to get the
status of who owns the code & their security?

i.e do these companies have un-restricted access to the user's code.
Considering any quantum advantage is worth million $, we need clarification on
the IP.

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krastanov
A lot of the services say something about owning the code you send to them to
run. But at the present time this really does not matter, as these are only
tech demonstrations that barely run even toy models. Even worse with dwave,
they do not have a quantum computer as usually defined (something supposedly
more powerful than a classical computer).

