

D-Wave’s Quantum Computer Goes to the Races, Wins - jonbaer
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/514686/d-waves-quantum-computer-goes-to-the-races-wins/

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tiziano88
Are they really benchmarking their multi-million $ computer against a 600$
laptop?

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tluyben2
At least it's good to know that these computers will look like real machines
(including the right-side-up arrows) again instead of all that micro/nano
electronic none-sense you carry in your pocket.

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ryderm
Odd that they tested against consumer hardware, not a supercomputer, given
that is what this is really competing against.

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NamTaf
I think that it was trying to prove that it was not an illusion or cheat.
There's been a lot of debate about whether D-Wave is actually exploiting
quantum phenomena or whether they're (knowingly or not) just faking it. The
result of the 3600x speedup is pretty strong evidence to the former, however.

The thing with quantum PCs is that they'll be tuned to solve a certain style
of problem - kinda like how a micro-controller will have certain hardware
features built out of specific logic gates. It doesn't surprise me therefore
that it struggles on more general stuff but that's beside the point.

By proving that they are indeed actually exploiting quantum computation, they
validate their theories. This opens them to being able to adapt their hardware
to suit particular problems - FFT [1], search [2], factorisation [3], etc. -
and sell it as revolutionary hardware to complete that particular task. That's
what the 3-letter-acronym government agencies will be after, after all.

Frankly, I'm overjoyed that they have good evidence that there's something
'real' going on here. They already had the backing of Google and some
3-letter-acronym government agencies through the purchase of hardware so that
was good circumstantial evidence that they knew something the public didn't.
This simply goes to further support their success.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Fourier_transform>

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm>

[3]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_Algorithm>

