41–50 of 97 posts
Is there a SDK? I'd like to port a NES simulator. (there is a conjecture that anything remotely able to do an addition will be used for emulating a Nintendo console)
Someone will ask how many Bitcoins this computer can mine any minute now!
Some of the comments in this thread talked about it. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5697619)
I learned a bit, so it's not too bad. :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand some of the words, but the article itself seems to me as ancient Greek. Can someone explain to me what the hell the whole story is about?
BACKGROUND: Quantum computing If you are able to get substantial numbers of "quantum bits" to stay entangled with one another, and hence behave in all those counterintuitive ways quantum things do, then you can (in principle) use the resulting machinery to perform some kinds of computations faster than any "conventional" computer can do them. Making that actually happen is an enormous engineering challenge. No one's…
OK, so the problem D-Wave has itself defined can be run faster on classical machinery. Does this also hold true for other problems run on the D-Wave?
The way one solves other problems on the D-Wave is by reducing them to the D-Wave problem, so save in extraordinary circumstances the answer will be "Yes."
It's a certain kind of binary optimization problem that comes up in models of magnetic media ("Ising model"). In the original magnetic context, the two states are N and S. Each magnetic element within a 2D array of states jiggles around locally trying to align with its neighbors, and by doing so, each state-flip influences a global energy function.
The same problem comes up in image processing. The probabilistic equations describing segmentation of on-object versus off-object regions are the same mathematically as the magnetic energy function of the Ising model.
This particular problem is important in its niche, but it's really not that general. It's possible that even something as trivial (analytically) as going from 2 to 3 states will not generalize well to the D-wave hardware.
And it's possible that, by the time you transform a given problem (say, graph matching) to encode it in this model, you end up with either (a) something with more variables than the original problem, (b) something with exotic parameter settings that the D-wave hardware cannot handle, or (c) a model having an energy surface that is not well-suited to the particular D-Wave computational mechanism (annealing).
In some applications, the use of linear programming relaxations (I have not read the detailed paper, but I assume this is the CPLEX result discussed in the post) is much slower than annealing, and in others, LP relaxations are more competitive. Sometimes the LP relaxations give much better results, but they tend to be much, much, slower, for the Ising problem.
I'm glad there are people who understand these things. I hope some day when the field of quantum computing congeals a bit more us mere mortals can begin to understand it as well.
If you are just looking for the theoretical basics , this youtube series [1] is a good place to start.
While I do find these videos approachable, they are fairly math heavy. Most of the lectures I've seen explain things at a level that almost anyone can get something out of, and you don't miss out if you skip over the stuff that is beyond you.
For most of the talks, the math involved is only algebra and vectors. Although, the vectors are represented using bra-ket notation which may throw you off.
[1]http://www.youtube.com/user/mnielsencourses?feature=watch
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand some of the words, but the article itself seems to me as ancient Greek. Can someone explain to me what the hell the whole story is about?
BACKGROUND: Quantum computing If you are able to get substantial numbers of "quantum bits" to stay entangled with one another, and hence behave in all those counterintuitive ways quantum things do, then you can (in principle) use the resulting machinery to perform some kinds of computations faster than any "conventional" computer can do them. Making that actually happen is an enormous engineering challenge. No one's…
Please include this as a blog post on your blog, so that it does not get lost.
Thanks again for the explanation.
-Kaushik
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand some of the words, but the article itself seems to me as ancient Greek. Can someone explain to me what the hell the whole story is about?
BACKGROUND: Quantum computing If you are able to get substantial numbers of "quantum bits" to stay entangled with one another, and hence behave in all those counterintuitive ways quantum things do, then you can (in principle) use the resulting machinery to perform some kinds of computations faster than any "conventional" computer can do them. Making that actually happen is an enormous engineering challenge. No one's…
I'm glad there are people who understand these things. I hope some day when the field of quantum computing congeals a bit more us mere mortals can begin to understand it as well.
I'm glad there are people who understand these things. I hope some day when the field of quantum computing congeals a bit more us mere mortals can begin to understand it as well.
Quantum computing is actually surprisingly approachable. Unfourtuantly, the written material on it is still mostly in the research paper format, which is very rarely usefull for mortals. However, many lectures on the subject are pretty approachable. I used to have a collection of links to Perimeter Institute videos, but they seem to have 404`ed, and I don't have the time to dig up the new urls. If you are just lookin…
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-det...
The main thing that's needed to follow along is familiarity and comfort with basic linear algebra.
The position of most of the scientific community at the outset regarding D-Wave quantum computers was that it was uncertain what was going on at all. Nobody knew for sure if the D-Wave computers were really using quantum entanglement when they ran or not. Obviously a computer that does computations without doing at least some of the weird things allowed by quantum mechanics wouldn't be much of a quantum computer.
It appears that the D-Wave computers could indeed be taking advantage of entanglement. However since the D-Wave computers are not very isolated from their environment, the delicate effects they attempt to harness are sometimes disrupted when the computer interacts with its environment (aka decoherence to use the Quantum Mechanics term).
Overall it looks like D-Wave is making some progress on demonstrating their computer does really harness what's allowed by quantum mechanics. This is exciting, though ironically they have not caught up to their own overstated claims of what their machine does. Perhaps with more work they can better isolate their computer from it's environment and graduate from quantum annealing to reversible adiabatic quantum computing. Or maybe someone else working with some other physical system which has an intrinsically lower coupling to it's environment might beat them to it. An exciting time for the field nonetheless.
Getting a speed up on a particular class of problem could have a great deal of practical importance, but building a scalable computer that fully takes advantage of everything allowed by the laws of physics is the holy grail of quantum computing, and it doesn't look like D-Wave is there quite yet. Still an exciting time for the field nonetheless.