The ENTIRE Quantum Computing issue comes down to if you TRY to read a Q-bit or write a Q-bit it will de-cohere and suddenly lose its final state. What you NEED to do in order to create a TRUE all-states-at-once super-positional-based quantum computer, is to NOT try to read the actual Q-bit itself but rather read and set the position or spin states of nearby molecular structures WHICH WILL INFER their state to and from the actual Q-bit which is entangled with ANOTHER nearby or far-away Q-bit or has a final annealed quantum state which will nearly instantaneously be transferred to and from the actual real-world structure which can be reliably read and written by a detector.
The nearby real-world structures send or receive ECHOS of their state to the Q-bit which can be manipulated by INFERENCE rather than by direct actuation.
D-Wave DOES NOT CREATE true quantum computers BUT the "Quantum Loops" they do use which are made out of super-cooled superconductors ACT LIKE logical Q-bits, which means the difference between their "Hybrid" system and a TRUE super-positional state-based quantum computer is a mere matter of Semantics.
D-Wave is also ONE OF THE FEW who can make a 1000+ Qubit computer so it has a SIGNIFICANT LEAD OVER MANY OTHER COMPANIES in creating practical quantum computation systems.
So long you can create a computer that gives you a WEIGHTED value between 0-to-10 that can be converted to a Boolean-like value such as below:
ABSOLUTELY TRUE
LIKELY TRUE
POSSIBLY TRUE
BOTH TRUE AND FALSE
NEITHER TRUE OR FALSE
POSSIBLY FALSE
LIKELY FALSE
ABSOLUTELY FALSE
NO VALUE IS CURRENTLY SET
UNABLE TO DETERMINE VALUE AT THIS TIME -- RETRY LATER
INVALID VALUE
if ANY type of computation system can get you the above values, it means it can be used in designing, building and running a PROPER AND TRUE Neural Net or a Rules-based Expert System which means there are a LOT of applications in Finance, Data Mining, Material Sciences, Aero, Plasma and Magneto-dynamics simulations which means it is VERY VALUABLE TOOL for any corporate or government entity.
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Our own massive supercomputing systems in Vancouver and Northern British Columbia, Canada are made up of 60 GHz and 2 THz GaAs based opto-electronic super-chips which form CLASSICAL supercomputing systems that can handle general integer, fixed-point and floating-point numeric computations and pixel-based/full bitmap and text-oriented processing tasks.
These form a 119 ExaFLOP system (128-bits wide) in Vancouver and a much larger Yotta-FLOPS system in northern BC which are used mostly for materials sciences data mining and WBE (Whole Brain Emulation) electro-chemical simulations.
They are NOT Quantum Computers!
BUT we are also building IN-HOUSE stamped sets of borosilicate glass panels that have micron-sized quantum wells/gas traps containing groups of Xenon atoms which can be pushed into one of the four "clover-leaves" of the quantum well which forms a two-bit value which can be interpreted as a classical -2 to +1 signed integer value or a unsigned integer 0-to-3 value which can be used for general bitwise storage OR as the basis for a logical transistor which can be made into virtualized microcircuits forming ANY SORT of logical CPU/GPU/DSP processor. The Xenon atoms are pushed and held into a specific "leaf" of the quantum well by a nano-laser usually in the UV band (i.e. a Blue Ray laser!)
You can ALSO USE lower power pulsed lasers in the IR and Green bands to READ or WRITE a specific phase or reflectivity of the returned photons by changing/affecting the spin or charge of the aggregated group of trapped Xenon atoms.
The overall aggregated AVERAGE of the phase or reflectivity when measured over a minimum of 10 up to 100 pulses BECOMES a weighted value (i.e. a 0-to-10 value) which can be converted into a Boolean-like state or a 0.0-to-100.0 percentage-based value.
This means we can make neural nets or expert systems out of this. Because lasers can be pulsed at nanosecond up to to attosecond time-periods, it means we can store and retrieve a given value at a data rate into the many many Petabytes per second of throughput!
AND since we can make ARRAYS of 1024 by 1024 of clover-leaf shaped Xenon traps/quantum wells, it means we can store and set/read MILLIONS of bits of data in mere nanoseconds.
AND because our manufacturing system uses the same type of technology used to stamp Compact Discs/DVDs/BluRay discs, it costs us only $40 USD to stamp the array of quantum wells in less than 5 seconds per boro-silicate glass panel AND less than $200 USD to etch arrays of nano-lasers directly into and near each quantum well using electron-beam technology which will be used to set or get the "Q-Bit" values. We can then combine MANY such glass quantum well panels to create MASSIVE neural net-oriented processing supercomputers!
We have had this technology in-house for MORE THAN 20 years now but we are just now beginning to CHEAPLY stamp out boro-silicate quantum well-like Xenon gas trap panels by the millions to form POWERFUL neural nets used in advanced data mining and neural nets/expert systems that gives us ALMOST-THE-BEST-CASE or NEARLY-THERE-BEST-GUESS answers to many of our deepest scientific questions!
Again, this is NOT a true "Quantum Computer" but rather a HYBRID system that INFERS a quantum position and/or atomic spin states into a nearby real-world molecular structure which CAN be read from and written to by a real world device such as a UV, IR or Green laser!
Since we DO NOT NEED to worry about de-coherence and error-correction like all the OTHER companies who are trying to make "Real" quantum computers, we can simply get on with making a fast computing system that will solve MANY pressing scientific questions to the best of it's ability rather than give us a binary YES/NO answer.
Our final results just need to be BEST GUESSES or NEARLY-THERE answers and NOT truly concrete results which makes our system IDEAL for the types of nebulous data mining problems we are trying to solve.
Now You Know!
V
Biting the hand that feeds IT
