Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
newscientist.com
Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
#2I suppose it's a bit too early to be relevant, but does anyone knows what's the gain in term of price at this point ?
Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
#3I really wish there was more information in this article.
Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
#4So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right?
Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?
Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
#5So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right? Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?
Not exactly. D-Wave quantum computers (like the one in the article) use "adiabatic quantum computing", which is more limited than normal quantum computing (it can't run every quantum algorithm). We're still a little ways off from breaking RSA.
Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
#6I really wish there was more information in this article.
Her website (linked in the article) has a copy of the paper.
http://www.cs.amherst.edu/ccm/cf14-mcgeoch.pdf
Quoting her paper, she used the D-Wave computer to solve instances of three NP-Hard problems: Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO); Weighed Maximum 2-Satis ability (W2SAT), and the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). She then compared the runtime with current software libraries run on Intel Xenons.
Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
#7So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right? Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?
Well, actually not all our encryption methods: there are asymmetric encryption algorithms that provide strong encryption even in the face of quantum computers. Unfortunately, the whole world is using RSA which is vulnerable.
I don't know that much about quantum computing, but I believe it may be possible that D-Wave has managed to figure out how to build a useful quantum computer that is nevertheless not general-purpose enough to execute Shor's algorithm for factoring primes.
Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
#8Related: When I first heard about quantum computers I thought a bit would be a value of 0 to 1 (or 0V to 5V or something like that). I still am very curious if such a computer could exist and would be useful. For example to do very quick raytracing. Although inaccurate (I assume) it could still be very useful.
Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
#9So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right? Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?
Not exactly. D-Wave quantum computers (like the one in the article) use "adiabatic quantum computing", which is more limited than normal quantum computing (it can't run every quantum algorithm). We're still a little ways off from breaking RSA.
Indeed; you can't build a quantum CPU with D-Wave's system.
It's conceptually more similar to a GPU which can solve a specific subset of (non-embarrassingly-parallel) problems in polynomial rather than exponential time, with the published number of qubits essentially being the amount of working memory available.
In practice these machines would probably be found optimizing certain steps in machine learning algorithms.
Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
#10wouldn't it be more fair to compare to an FPGA solution for those problem sets?