D-Wave Open Sources Its Quantum Computing Tool

Long-time Slashdot reader haruchai writes: Canadian company D-Wave has released their qbsolv tool on GitHub to help bolster interest and familiarity with quantum computing. "qbsolv is a metaheuristic or partitioning solver that solves a potentially large QUBO problem by splitting it into pieces that are solved either on a D-Wave system or via a classical tabu solver," they write on GitHub.

This joins the QMASM macro assembler for D-Wave systems, a tool written in Python by Scott Pakin of Los Alamos National Labs. D-Wave president Bo Ewald says "D-Wave is driving the hardware forward but we need more smart people thinking about applications, and another set thinking about software tools."

What??

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"qbsolv is a metaheuristic or partitioning solver that solves a potentially large QUBO problem by splitting it into pieces that are solved either on a D-Wave system or via a classical tabu solver"

I know some of those words but all I can really tell is that it apparently does things to stuff, or does stuff to things.

Re:

[cfalcon]

> words

I'm not really sure those all quite qualify as words....

Re: What??

[MartyJG]

It's both words and not words at the same time.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

qbsolv: name of the program
partitioning: a family of methods for solving hard optimisation problems by splitting it up into subproblems
metaheuristic: a heuristic that generates heuristics
QUBO: quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation
D-Wave: the company that makes these machines
classical: non-quantum
tabu: A Tongan word, meaning "things that cannot be touched because they are sacred" (also spelled "taboo"). In this context, referring to tabu search, a common approach for solving hard optimisation problems

Re:

[Hognoxious]

"Ah, so it's kind of like facebook?"
--
The V.P. Of Marketing

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.

[0100010001010011]

• QUBO - Quadratic unconstrained binary optimization [wikipedia.org] is a pattern matching technique, common in machine learning applications. QUBO is an NP hard problem.
• Tabu search [wikipedia.org] take[s] a potential solution to a problem and check its immediate neighbors (that is, solutions that are similar except for one or two minor details) in the hope of finding an improved solution. Local search methods have a tendency to become stuck in suboptimal regions or on plateaus where many solutions are equally fit.

CMAES better

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm disappointed to find it splits up the problem, you rarely find an optimal solution by trying each variable as though they're independent.
And I'm most disappointed that it's unconstrained. Which makes it totally useless for every problem I've ever used an optimizer.

CMAES (available in various libraries, e.g. Apache Math) is probably a better choice for "can't solve it any other way" optimizations. That tries N points randomly distributed across each variable depending on each variables deviation. With N

This won't help solving real world problems

[ffkom]

... any faster than can be done on conventional computers, today. All this hype around the D-Wave machines should not distract us from the fact that when competing for solving a given problem fastest against conventional computers, using the algorithms best suited for the respective hardware (and not making the conventional computer simulate a D-Wave like machine), the D-Wave machine loses every contest.
Open-sourcing some tools won't change that in any way.

Re:

[Richard_at_work]

Honest question then - why do people buy D-Wave systems then?

Re:

[ffkom]

Because D-Wave managed (via clever marketing) to scare a few organizations with deep pockets into thinking that if they didn't buy D-Wave systems, they could miss that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a miraculous Quantum computer at hand while their competitors/enemies do not.

Re:

[ffkom]

The smart people at Google and Lockheed do realize that they can get funding for years of interesting research on all kinds of cool things by telling that "we are almost there with quantum computing", and money spent on under-performing D-Wave hardware is a rather small collateral damage in relation to the whole research funding riding the quantum computer hype, which may well result in useful findings, even if those are not quite the new super-computers that got them funded.

Re:This won't help solving real world problems

[Pseudonym]

Here's a slightly more neutral answer:

Because D-Wave is a decade ahead of every other competing technology when it comes engineering and systems integration. D-Wave machines do actually work on real-world problems. They do not work as well as carefully-tuned classical approaches, but they do work.

It's possible that the D-Wave approach may be an evolutionary dead-end for quantum computing. Most people who understand the technology and are outside D-Wave (including Google and Lockheed) would probably put the odds at greater than 50% that D-Wave isn't the most promising approach. Nonetheless, we owe it to ourselves as an industry to test it because it's the only one that's here now.

Fakable, and probably fake

[Anonymous Coward]

Take any process which can be simulated by a computer, and create optimized hardware to run that simulation. Encryption, 3D video, "quantum computing". Optimized hardware can outperform any general-purpose computer, even at lower clock speeds, especially if the operations don't map well to what is considered general-purpose. How much of D-Wave's positive reception is due to "ground-breaking quantum computing progress" vs. actual improvements in computation? I'm not saying that they haven't made real pro

Re:

[Pseudonym]

I'm not saying that they haven't made real progress in running the algorithms quantum computers are claimed to do so well, I'm just saying there's no proof that any "quantum computing" is actually going on.

Not true. Pretty much everyone who researches quantum computing is now convinced that the D-Wave machine does something that can reasonably called "quantum computation" because it matched [arxiv.org] a theoretical prediction [arxiv.org]. To a physicist, that's the best kind of evidence.

It's still not really that useful, of course.

Re:

[Pseudonym]

Scott Aaronson disagrees with you, but OK.

marketroids

[John_3000]

"we need more smart people thinking about applications" = we have a solution looking for a problem

Re:

[silvermorph]

We have a hammer that no one can figure out how to swing.

Hammer

[hackwrench]

We have a hammer that does interesting things when swung. We want to study this hammer to see if what we learn can't be used to make a hammer that is actually better than the best hammers out there.

we have a solution looking for a problem

[Dusthead Jr.]

People seem to say that as if it were a bad thing. Personally I'd rather have solutions to problems I've yet to have. Inversely, I wouldn't mind having all of my future problems solved using only existing solutions. A win-win in my book.

Re:

[John_3000]

It's a bad thing in that it's bad business --- a bad investment because no one needs to buy the product. Fine as a hobby though, or as research if you have a grant.

"quantum" computing

[globaljustin]

D-wave is not quantum computing. It's regular, non-quantum computing that uses software to simulate what we think using non-locality in computing would be.

Humans actually controlling quantum non-locality would be arguably the biggest feat since harnessing the atom...it amazes me how this blatant bs continues to be called "quantum"...

Re: "quantum" computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantum annealing is a process that does use quantum processes on the chip, just isn't the usual quantum gate computer that get most of the news elsewhere (and have been actually build with very small numbers of gates... so you seem behind the news on that).

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The D-Wave computer isn't BQP-complete, so you can't run, say, Shor's algorithm on it. It's much more like a quantum Enigma or a quantum calculating machine [wikipedia.org] than a quantum computer in the ordinary, general purpose sense of the word.

Re:

[globaljustin]

Quantum annealing

it's simulated programatically, it's not actual quantum annealing or any kind of actual non-locality (which like I said would be one of the biggest physics acheivements in human history)

Re:

[globaljustin]

simulated...it's all simulated

actual 'non-locality' would be faster-than-light travel and turn some core Einstein theories on their head...b?it would be transmitting information isntantaneously regardless of distance and that would be kind of a big deal

it's all simulated at some level...simulated or redefined in such a way to make it not actual non-locality

Re:

[quax]

This is patently false. The machine has been confirmed to perform quantum annealing by independent researchers. [arxiv.org]

And actual non-locality is every day reality in experimental quantum physics, for instance for quantum encryption.

Re:

[quax]

The hedging in the paper is the typical verbiage that you get with any data driven study.

At any rate, it wouldn't be classical computing in the digital sense but reduce to a mostly analog annealer. The original claim was that the D-Wave machine was essentially a fake, and this has been discredited three ways till Sunday.

They set out to build a quantum annealer and it acts like one. What is unclear is how useful this process will actually be in practice. Quantum speed-ups are not at all guaranteed with this

Re:

[globaljustin]

What is unclear is how useful this process will actually be in practice. Quantum speed-ups are not at all guaranteed with this design. That's were the focus should be. Not some rehashed conspiracy theory that D-Wave is faking their hardware.

you're hitting it here...

the controversy is about what "fake" is...actual quantum non-locality would be faster than light information and that would turn Einstein's theories, as well as many other theories on their head

critics are right to say that D-wave is not actual

Re:

[quax]

The ERP paradox [wikipedia.org] that you are alluding two was solved by Niels Bohr just two days after Einstein presented it to him.

Quantum Information is fundamentally different than classical Information. A pure quantum information channel that only establishes entanglement does not transport classical information, it just established a quantum correlation. But this correlation can only be confirmed after corresponding classical information over the measured state on one end of the channel reaches the other end.

That cl

Re:

[globaljustin]

entanglement establishes an instantaneous signalling is grossly wrong

look at the tachyonic anti-telephone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

using non-local quantum entaglement to instantaneously transmit information indeed would be faster-than-light

humans have not achieved non-local entanglement, nor have they used it for computing, and unless you redefine "quantum" then it's not possible for these to be "quantum computers"

yes, you're right that we could only verify the signal transmission at light speed, b

Re:

[quax]

"Using non-local quantum entanglement to instantaneously transmit information indeed would be faster-than-light."

Yes, and entanglement can't do that as I tried to explain in my earlier post.

You do not transport information but quantum information with entanglement. They are as far removed from each other as Schroedinger's cat from any pet you've ever owned.

BTW tachyon are hypothetical faster than light particles. Of course you could signal into the past if such a resource existed and could be technologicall

Re:

[globaljustin]

I will definitely have a look, thank you very much.

There is something here that I think is relevant:

Bell essentially codified the latter's reservations and wanted to prove Einstein right, but nature did not cooperate.....It's these weird experimental results that have brow beaten physicists accepting entanglement as a fundamentally non-local phenomenon, against the marked resistance of some of the best and brightest minds like Einstein and Bell.

Now, I don't expect a response necessarily because I'm just spi

How well does this thing perfom...?

[jgfenix]

... compared to a normal computer or a GPU? And what about the energy consumption? Is it useful more than the coolness of the quantum thing?