D-Wave Large-Scale Quantum Chip Validated, Says USC Team 141
An anonymous reader writes "A team of scientists says it has verified that quantum effects are indeed at work in the D-Wave processor, the first commercial quantum optimization computer processor. The team demonstrated that the D-Wave processor behaves in a manner that indicates that quantum mechanics has a functional role in the way it works. The demonstration involved a small subset of the chip's 128 qubits, but in other words, the device appears to be operating as a quantum processor."
Re:The question is (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong kind of quantum computer. This does quantum annealing [wikipedia.org].
Re:Was anyone really surprised by this? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:'incredibly' (Score:2, Informative)
Fixed that for you, you left out the first/primary definition as shown below...
incredibly
Adverb
1. To a great degree; extremely: "incredibly brave".
2. Used to introduce a statement that is hard to believe; strangely: "incredibly, he was still alive".
Synonyms
unbelievably
Re:It Still Doesn't Mean Much... (Score:4, Informative)
You can't fight an exponential or even polynomial complexity merely by reducing constant factors. It doesn't matter what the constant factor is. All it takes is bumping, say, RSA from 4096 to 16384 bits. That's all you need to beat any conceivable reduction in the constant factor. Just think about it.
Re:It Still Doesn't Mean Much... (Score:4, Informative)
Why would a quantum computer would reduce the O notation?
Because it's running in multiple worlds simultaneously? It's not just using 1's and 0's but superpositions of the two that are effectively in both states at once. Heh... I'm really don't understand this stuff, but the big deal about quantum computing is that it will make some previously intractable (e.g., non-polynomial) problems accessible to us. All problems in complexity class BQP [wikipedia.org] become, essentially, polynomial on a quantum computer. If you've got enough qbits, among other things.
Re:intel dead? (Score:3, Informative)
It won't become the thing for general computing use. There are specific applications where quantum operations can compute faster, but if it's a matter of what computers are normally used for, standard digital computing hardware is the thing.
That said, quantum processor cores may become an accessory you can buy for your computer, complete with the software needed to set up quantum optimization problems, and high end scientific workstations might have them built in some day.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
I am pretty sure that this 7-month-old arXiv preprint [arxiv.org] corresponds to the Nature Communications [nature.com] paper. The titles and author lists are identical, but the abstract deviates, so who knows what changes it went through in revision (I don't have access to the official paper either, even at the university where I work). But presumably it covers the same ground, and it looks like all of the figures from the official are in the preprint.
(Yo, fuck Nature Publishing Group.)
Re:It Still Doesn't Mean Much... (Score:3, Informative)
Pedantic nitpick: Quantum computers cannot break public key (RSA) encryption in O(1) time; for a modulus N the time complexity is O(Log(n)^3).