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D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

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21–30 of 39 posts

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where can one see the results of a useful result.. and by that i mean

Submitted problem X to Dwave cost $Y and returned in Z minutes.

Vs

Problem X cost $A and returned in W minutes from AWS...

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#23
Lots of questions about "is this real or a scam", "what's it good for", "what's the difference between this and a true QC". Well...

I have signed up for this, I know very little about the nath, the theory etc. I'm not a computer scientist but apperantly that is what they want, they want people that will come at quantum computing with little to no previous knowledge and come at it with a different point of view..in particular they are hoping for the "killer app". I figure if the Kardashians can get ritch off the internet without knowing one line of code, maybe I have a shot with this!

It will cost me nothing but a bit of time and at the very least I will gain a bit of experience from it. I have not spent much time on it but have watched a few of their videos and they seem to explain things a bit better than the regular "both 0 and 1" crap most people spew.

Here are two links to their videos that cover a lot of the questions asked in this thread.

I say keep an open mind and give it a shot, don't let the nay sayers make you miss out on something that could be a great opportunity.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_3470308...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_2178338...

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#24
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?

What D-Wave is building is not what most other people mean when they say Quantum Computer.

What they build is as far as my lay understanding is something that is much more limited than a "normal" quantum computer. That's why you can't compare qubits from D-Wave with other QC technology.

What D-Wave has is technically called an adiabatic quantum computer and they've yet to show that you can do anything useful with it.

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#25
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?

A universal quantum computer with 20 qubits is kind of like a general purpose 20-core CPU. A 2000-qubir D-WAVE quantum annealing computer is kind of like a 2000 "cores" GPU. It's not a perfect analogy by any means but it should make the difference clearer.

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#26
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?

Those guys are all building gate based quantum computers which are universal and can run (in theory) any quantum algorithm such as Shor's algorithm. By contrast, D-Wave is pursuing "quantum annealing" which basically solves very specific types of optimization problems and the hope is that it will be economically useful enough in the near future.

See this for a decent comparison: http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/qc/qc18/readings/gottlieb2...

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#27
post #25
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?

A universal quantum computer with 20 qubits is kind of like a general purpose 20-core CPU. A 2000-qubir D-WAVE quantum annealing computer is kind of like a 2000 "cores" GPU. It's not a perfect analogy by any means but it should make the difference clearer.

It doesn’t.

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#28
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one questions its ability to do some amount of math. The doubt is in how it scales.

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#29
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?

D-wave have spent a lot of effort to show that their machine is quantum, and it seems convincing enough.

However, it's not a computer (i.e. a general-purpose machine, able to run arbitrary programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine). Instead, their machine is a special-purpose calculator, which finds an approximate minimum value for a certain sort of problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_optimization ).

I always take D-wave's claims with a pinch of salt, since their original announcements were incredibly misleading. They claimed their calculator could solve problems orders of magnitude faster than a program running on a classical computer, but they turned out the be comparing apples with oranges: their machine finds an approximate solution, while the program they compared against was guaranteed to find an exact solution (i.e. it would carry on going until all other possibilities had been eliminated).

Other researchers did a more apples to apples comparison, by writing an approximate program (essentially simulating what the D-wave machine does). They found that a normal consumer laptop was actually much faster than the $10,000,000 D-wave machine.

D-wave's newer machines are more powerful, but I don't know if their machines benefit from the scaling properties of quantum computers (their qubits are noisy, which AFAIK prevents them all entangling completely)

Re: D-Wave Launches Free Quantum Cloud Service

#30
post #24
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?

What D-Wave is building is not what most other people mean when they say Quantum Computer. What they build is as far as my lay understanding is something that is much more limited than a "normal" quantum computer. That's why you can't compare qubits from D-Wave with other QC technology. What D-Wave has is technically called an adiabatic quantum computer and they've yet to show that you can do anything useful with it.

Nitpicking: It is not an adiabatic quantum computer either. Adiabatic quantum computers have as much computing power as the other more usual models of quantum computing (the quantum circuit model for instance). Dwave have a quantum annealing machine, which as far as I know does not do anything better than a classical computer.
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