
Scott Aaronson on Google’s new quantum-computing paper - mserdarsanli
http://news.mit.edu/2015/3q-scott-aaronson-google-quantum-computing-paper-1211
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daveguy
If you came here like I did, thinking "HEY! That's old news!". You are
correct. This added bonus is an interview of Aaronson for MIT News about his
response to the google paper (which he previously blogged about). The original
blog post has an update from Aaronson:

" MIT News now has a Q&A with me about the new Google paper. I’m really happy
with how the Q&A turned out; people who had trouble understanding this blog
post might find the Q&A easier. Thanks very much to Larry Hardesty for
arranging it."

EDIT: It is definitely worth the read. A concise laymans summary of the
original post and outline of the issues still to be overcome by D-Wave.

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raverbashing
Yes, this is much easier to understand and to get the specific points of
contention.

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fivesigma
TL;DR version: If there's any quantum phenomena going on in that device, it is
only happening within the 8-qubit domains and not between them.

Bonus food for thought: how much more of a speedup factor would an ASIC farm
provide compared to a general purpose CPU for that particular use case if you
threw $150M on it?

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DannyBee
"There were $150 million dollars that went into designing this special-purpose
hardware for this D-Wave machine and making it as fast possible. So in some
sense, it’s no surprise that this special-purpose hardware could get a
constant-factor speedup over a classical computer for the problem of
simulating itself."

I kinda wonder how much money scott thinks goes into most chip hardware ;-)

(I think the special vs general purpose argument is certainly true, but citing
the money numbers to bolster it seems ... silly)

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gnoway
I saw this headline and immediately thought "that's some pretty special
paper."

It's been a long day.

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dvh
> "A mainstream media article about quantum computer that starts with a
> reference to D-Wave can be safely ignored"

marcosdumay, HN, 1 hour ago

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mikeyouse
I think there's an obvious exception for MIT's news, especially when talking
to Aaronson who has loudly been challenging D-Wave's quantum claims for years.

~~~
x1798DE
My general rule is to ignore anything that comes from MIT news as low quality
anyway, so no conflict there.

~~~
dubhrosa
Now that someone has said this I realise I've been doing the same for quite
some time. It looks like a PR department with a university attached. Edit:
it's not so much that it's usually just low quality, it's the offputting way
they always state "MIT researchers prove that...", and whenever I dig into the
area it's clear there's an active research community with leading figures in
less fashionable universities that get no mention from the MIT press corps.
The other top US universities don't seem to do this, at least nowhere near as
much as MIT. Then again, maybe it's the general press and public who have
bought into MIT fetishism and they're the reason these stories get picked up
so often. (Saying all that, Aaronson is pretty awesome though)

