Posts by ramsey66 8 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2014
Actually, it's not that trivial or easy at all, they have done the test you mentioned. D-wave is faster in some cases and not in others.
The problem is, finding the right problem for testing or benchmarking is also very very hard. You need a very "hard" or "improbable" problem (as mentioned above) that only a quantum computer can reasonably solve in time. Finding that "quantum" problem is a complicated business.
The support and developments on D-wave goes to show that D-wave is on the right track in taking the ENGINEERING approach to quantum computing, otherwise quantum computing will just be a pipe dream.
Do we fully understand the physics of matter or electricity? No, yet use them everyday and built technology around them.
I used the term "quantumly" because based on the experiment, the Dwave machine may not fully utilize the quantum effects of the qubits depending on noise. Therefore it can be more quantum or less quantum. For example, it will entangle more or less qubits depending on the noise. The Dwave machine can still give you answers even when it's not fully entangled, you will just get better or worse answers. There's almost no right or wrong answers here.
You are probably thinking of the gate model quantum computing where if the entanglement is not perfect you will get a wrong answer. Dwave is based on Adiabatic Quantum Computing (AQC).
Just because it's not yet faster than conventional processors doesn't mean it's not going to be. There's still a lot of architectural and engineering challenges to be solved to expose the quantum advantage. The technology is in the very early stages. Think about this, when the Wright brothers built their historic airplaine, did it go as fast as the fighter jets of today? The Wright brothers provided the basic principle for long-distance flight and pointed everybody in the right direction.
It seems everybody here has a hard time understanding about the "noise" in the experiment. "noise" (heat, magnetism) in a quantum machine generally destroys quantum processing (not good), the more noise the less quantum is the machine. The less noise the more quantum it is, and this is how they observed the behavior of the Dwave machine. This means it is consistent in behaving quantumly.
That is easier said than done. In order to determine a speed up they need to make a fair comparison and that means finding the appropriate problem to solve to show the difference, otherwise they will end up comparing apples and oranges. FInding that problem is not easy. The last comparison they did found no evidence of speed up on Dwave but even that was not conclusive because of the type of problem being solved. Plus the Dwave archiitecture is not yet mature.
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