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D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

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Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#11
Last I knew (a few months ago) we were somewhere less than 20 qubits and getting a straight answer on “does it work” depended on who was being interviewed. How do they have a 2048 qubit chip? And why is it a binary multiple? Did I miss some announcement?

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#12
post #11

Last I knew (a few months ago) we were somewhere less than 20 qubits and getting a straight answer on “does it work” depended on who was being interviewed. How do they have a 2048 qubit chip? And why is it a binary multiple? Did I miss some announcement?

At best, d-wave is making an adiabatic quantum computer, not a gate based quantum computer, at worst (most likely), they're a scam.

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#15
post #12
post #11

Last I knew (a few months ago) we were somewhere less than 20 qubits and getting a straight answer on “does it work” depended on who was being interviewed. How do they have a 2048 qubit chip? And why is it a binary multiple? Did I miss some announcement?

At best, d-wave is making an adiabatic quantum computer, not a gate based quantum computer, at worst (most likely), they're a scam.

It doesn't look like a scam. When you sign up, you get an API key, and you can get an SDK and submit problems to it.

I'm not enough of a mathematician to be able to formulate anything, but there's a growing list of people that have been able to get useful results from it.

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#16

So is this actually useful for anything practical? Even with my limited understanding of the state of the art, I'm pretty sure that "factoring large numbers in milliseconds" is not actually something that D-Wave machines can do.

There's some applications listed on their website, this one about Volkswagen doing some traffic pattern analysis was kinda interesting even if I can't follow the math: https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/VW.pdf

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#17

To my knowledge, there are still no tasks a D-Wave is better at (asymptotically) than a classical machine

Last time I checked they haven't even beaten semi-recent laptops in direct comparisons of execution time, even for very synthetic problems.

Probably true, but in some ways it's not a fair comparison - since the field is only 20-30 years old, it's not surprising the offerings are comparable to something in the earlier ages of computing. Many kinds of mechanisms that seemed esoteric at their origin (e.g. the primitive but groundbreaking neural networking of the Perceptron) have become everyday reality for us decades later.

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#19
Has anyone compared the terms of these quantum cloud services to get the status of who owns the code & their security?

i.e do these companies have un-restricted access to the user's code. Considering any quantum advantage is worth million $, we need clarification on the IP.

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#20

So is this actually useful for anything practical? Even with my limited understanding of the state of the art, I'm pretty sure that "factoring large numbers in milliseconds" is not actually something that D-Wave machines can do.

There's some applications listed on their website, this one about Volkswagen doing some traffic pattern analysis was kinda interesting even if I can't follow the math: https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/VW.pdf

It is an interesting paper, and I can see how the D-Wave architecture would be well suited to it, but, as slide 6 says:

> The Question that drove us... Is there a real-world problem that could be addressed with a Quantum Computer?

So it's a classical case of a solution in search of a problem.

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