
D-Wave: Is $15m machine a glimpse of future computing? - wolfwyrd
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27264552
======
yaakov34
There is a history of literally many years of bombastic claims being made by
D-Wave (especially in the popular press) without anything to back them up.
Scott Aaronson
([http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/)), an
MIT professor who is one of the better-known scientists in the quantum
computing field, has written reams of pages about this. I would recommend
browsing his blog if you are really interested in the claims and counterclaims
about this company.

As for me, I will not waste a single minute reading an article about them,
until they can convince the sceptics first. This may seem unfair (if people
aren't willing to give them a chance, then how will we know if they've really
made a breakthrough), but this company has earned this kind of treatment by
bamboozling journalists and getting breathless press coverage based on
nothing. Briefly, for years, they failed to even demonstrate that their
machine exhibits any quantum entanglement at all; this makes it meaningless to
talk about quantum computing on that machine, which didn't prevent press
stories touting it as the next revolution in all of human existence. Since
then, there have been some articles claiming that possibly there is some kind
of quantum behaviour in the machine, but there was still no evidence that this
quantum behaviour is doing anything meaningful in the actual computations. At
some point, I stopped following the story.

~~~
eoinmurray92
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.

~~~
sharpneli
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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
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.

~~~
aaronem
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.

~~~
mike_ivanov
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.

~~~
lispm
from 2011

[http://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/learning-to-program-
th...](http://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/learning-to-program-the-d-wave-
one-software-you-should-install-a-book-you-should-buy/)

> 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.

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

~~~
lispm
The info is pretty sketchy and three years old.

------
acqq
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1679](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1679)

"MAGIC 8-BALL: THE RENEGADE MATH WHIZ WHO COULD CHANGE NUMBERS FOREVER

An eccentric billionaire, whose fascinating hobbies include nude skydiving and
shark-taming, has been shaking up the scientific world lately with his
controversial claim that 8+0 equals 17 [... six more pages about the
billionaire redacted ...] It must be said that mathematicians, who we reached
for comment because we're diligent reporters, have tended to be miffed,
skeptical, and sometimes even sarcastic about the billionaire's claims. Not
surprisingly, though, the billionaire and his supporters have had some
dismissive comments of their own about the mathematicians. So, which side is
right? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle? At this early stage, it's hard
for an outsider to say. In the meantime, the raging controversy itself is
reason enough for us to be covering this story using this story template. Stay
tuned for more!"

And seriously:

"we have _no idea yet_ whether adiabatic optimization (the technology used by
D-Wave) is something where quantum computers can give any practically-
important speedup."

And how the results match those of the machine based on the classical (that
is, not quantum) model:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7087](http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7087)

------
coldcode
Even if it solves some optimization problems well, it's not worth $15m. You
can come up with the same solutions by spending far less money on way more CPU
power. Plus it's a black box which has totally proprietary content you are not
allowed to investigate based on some magical functionality. High on the PT
Barnum Scale.

~~~
mikeyouse
> High on the PT Barnum Scale.

As a relative layman, doesn't the interest from Google / NASA / Lockheed give
some merit to their claims? Or at least move it from the 'PT Barnum' scale to
some other speculative-but-feasible technology scale?

~~~
acqq
No. Once some entity has a lot of money to spend, it invests it in various
directions "just in case it might work." It's inevitable process, as soon as
there are a lot of people making decisions (or even a small number of them,
when it reflects their preferences). The money is invested in very weird stuff
and then even get to be used, "because it's there" even if it's not really
what it claims to be.

------
piokuc
Interestingly, they develop some software in Common Lisp for their computer,
here is a job offer from October last year:
[http://lispjobs.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/software-
developer-...](http://lispjobs.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/software-developer-d-
wave-burnaby-bc-canada/)

------
nicpottier
Ok HN, for those skilled in the art, is this real?

And what are the implications for cryptography? (isn't that always the
refrain, "until quantum computers this is safe?")

~~~
TTPrograms
D Wave has been iterating on their flagship machine for a few years now. The
big argument is if entanglement is happening on a large enough scale in their
system to enable the scaling laws that they claim they'll be able to hit. You
can find plots floating around where they extrapolate to having a computer
more powerful than a classical computer the size of the universe in ~2020.
Right now it's barely comparable with a rack of servers IIRC, but the big
claim is that quantum power scales much faster than classical power with
number of bits (exponential vs linear) when full entanglement is achieved. I'm
under the impression that the Googles and Boings and NASAs of the world want
to get their feet wet in the field despite its infancy.

It's a good effort at any rate. There's a lot of strong negativity around
DWave, which I find strange, given that it's existence isn't personally
inconveniencing their critics in any way. If adiabatic quantum computing works
it will really speed up the future tech timeline, so it's worth the effort.

~~~
VLM
"I'm under the impression that the Googles and Boings and NASAs of the world
want to get their feet wet in the field despite its infancy."

And note this is invariably trumpeted loudly as in current production
commercial end user applications. There are obvious financial / stock market
reasons for these wild claims. But if you clear away the PR haze, the field is
actually in the earliest research mode.

By computer analogy, whats going on in reality is the first ENIAC has been
partially wired although it doesn't work perfectly and may in fact never meet
its goals and may or may not ever have any direct effect on anyone, although
existing unit record equipment manufacturers are watching nervously. The
analogy of whats being presented by PR as a completed accomplishment is Zilog
having shipped their fifty millionth Z80 processor and the living rooms of
America are stuffed with "1980s home computers" which pretty much did have at
least some effect on everyone alive either then or later.

~~~
TTPrograms
Yeah, the PR is pretty extreme. I like to think that this is more for public
buzz and doesn't affect the decision makers, so I sort of disregard it.

------
r0muald
D-Wave was covered a few months ago by Lev Grossman
<[http://time.com/4802/quantum-leap/>](http://time.com/4802/quantum-leap/>) in
a much more balanced piece.

------
awongh
I understand why the actual quantum effect is hard to observe, but I'm not
sure I understand why the output is so hard to verify as being better or worse
than a classical computer....

Can someone name the physical effect that this processor employs outside of
any quantum effects that accounts for it possibly being faster than a room
temperature "normal" computer?

What algorithms are they running to try to verify that the computer is
quantum?

~~~
chriswarbo
D-Wave's machine is running an approximate optimisation algorithm. It's like
trying to solve a large Sudoku by filling in all of the squares randomly then
adjusting them to make the solution better and better (ie. get fewer invalid
squares).

They're using an 'annealing' algorithm to do this, which means that the
squares are all adjusted concurrently, in a random way which is biased by how
well each square's value fits with its neighbour's. D-Wave claimed that their
machine is quantum, without much evidence. They've since shown reasonable
evidence that their machine does indeed use quantum effects, so that it's
running a 'quantum annealing' algorithm; that basically means there's some
probability for non-neighbouring squares to interact, which may find better
solutions faster.

However, 'quantum annealing' isn't difficult to calculate. Despite the name,
it's easy for classical computers to implement it and they can do it faster
than D-Wave's machine (thanks to decades of Moore's Law). So at this point
D-Wave have a single-purpose ASIC which is more expensive and slower than
regular computers. They're doing something quantum, but there doesn't seem to
be much point.

Compare this to a "real" quantum computer, which would be general-purpose
(rather than being restricted to one algorithm like D-Wave's machine) and
would be able to efficiently run things like Shor's algorithm, which are known
to be unscalable on classical computers.

~~~
acqq
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1679](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1679)

"In other words, even if you could implement adiabatic optimization
perfectly—at zero temperature, with zero decoherence -- we still don't know
whether there's any quantum speedup to be had that way, for any of the nifty
applications that the article mentions: 'software design, tumor treatments,
logistical planning, the stock market, airlines schedules, the search for
Earth-like planets in other solar systems, and in particular machine
learning'"

------
retube
No.

~~~
throwwit
For 0.1 Instagrams worth of funding it is a start though.

~~~
TTPrograms
That is some real perspective there.

------
enupten
Does anyone know what local Quantum effects imply for the complexity of
problems it can solve ?

I thought the watershed between a Classical computer and Quantum one was the
ability to solve some hard problems believed to be in both NP and co-NP.

------
josiahwarren
If this is successful it will be a great leap for Many-Worlds and perhaps even
a precursor to time travel.

~~~
jjoonathan
No. The quantum mechanics that "supports" many-worlds (as in, many-worlds
seems to be the simplest explanation for the observed effects) has been in the
realm of "scientifically proven fact" for >70 years. D-wave will not add
significantly to the pile of evidence that already exists.

As for time travel, I can't possibly imagine how you think the two are
related. Bell's Theorem was verified 50 years ago. D-wave will not add to the
pile of evidence that already exists for quantum non-locality, it will not
contribute to exploiting quantum non-locality for the purposes of time travel
(if such a thing is even possible -- as we understand it, non-locality can't
even be used to transmit information femtoseconds back in time), and it will
not contribute to proving or disproving alternative theories for non-locality.

~~~
josiahwarren
What I was suggesting is that this would empirically favor quantum decoherence
over waveform collapse.

The ability to subsequently control quantum decoherence allows for its
patterns to be recorded and reproduced; i.e. an ability which would allow
humans to eventually recreate entire quantum sections and perhaps eventually
allow them to alter both the past, present and future states in-between the
margins of quantum decoherence.

I'm not suggesting non-locality; I'm suggesting non-realism from a universal
standpoint and thus the ability to control 'reality' lies in the ability of
human beings to control quantum decoherence and quantum mechanics.

The ability to recreate a version of the past via quantum mechanics is, in
effect, time travel.

We aren't too far away from full control of decoherence:

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5876/638](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5876/638)

------
cabalamat
I suspect Betteridge's law applies --
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

