D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge

> For years, I tirelessly repeated that D-Wave hadn’t even provided evidence that its qubits were entangled—and that, while you can have entanglement with no quantum speedup, you can’t possibly have a quantum speedup without at least the capacity to generate entanglement. Now, I’d say, D-Wave finally has cleared the evidence-for-entanglement bar—and, while they’re not the first to do so with superconducting qubits, they’re certainly the first to do so with so many superconducting qubits.

In other words, this is the first actual evidence that D-Wave even has the potential for quantum speedup.

1. Assign all states of each variable equal probability.

2. Sample the living crap out of the search space with some sort of energy function for every possible configuration, scoring the discrete values of the variables of each individual sample by Boltzmann weighting of the energy function.

3. Every so often update the weights for selecting each variables potential values using the accumulated scores for each variable generated during step 2.

4. Repeat steps 2 through 3 until each variable converges to a single state.

I never published anything but I learned three things from this process.

1. It worked like gangbusters to find the space surrounding global optima of reasonably complex functions

2. It worked like crap to refine really good solutions into really great solutions.

3. It was horribly dependent on the underlying representation of the variables (i.e. if you mapped the input variables to a spin glass, it was just awful)

That and I suspect somebody already has a fancy name for exactly what I did back then...