Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Buys a Quantum Computer

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 60 posts

Re: Google Buys a Quantum Computer

#4

Post by Ygg2 »

lmm wrote: post #3

Have D-Wave demonstrated any actual quantum behaviour yet? I had them down as a scam prior to the google involvement; now I'm not sure what to think.

There have been some calculations that are consistent with entaglement which is a premise for quantum behavior.

However D-Wave isn't a general quantum computer. It's an adiabatic quantum computer. I'm pretty sure it can't solve Shor's algorithm, because it only does function optimizations.

Re: Google Buys a Quantum Computer

#5

Post by yk »

lmm wrote: post #3

Have D-Wave demonstrated any actual quantum behaviour yet? I had them down as a scam prior to the google involvement; now I'm not sure what to think.

It seems that they did build a probably quantum but quite likely not computer. They are actually solving some optimization problem. And they do this quite well. However as far as I understood, they did not convincingly demonstrate that they are actually using a quantum version or a classical version of the system. And quite likely they can not run arbitrary computations. So it seems that the jury is still out, if they did build a quantum computer or a very specialized classical hardware.

Re: Google Buys a Quantum Computer

#7

Post by MildlySerious »

I think if there is someone I would not want to own a quantum computer, next to Lockheed Martin, thats Google. They already are at least 10 years ahead of everyone else. If they are the first to spend the money on seriously making use of quantum computers, who on earth is going to stop them if they decide to make bad use of their power?

I'd really like to see this power in a companies hands that is not against the concept of privacy.

Re: Google Buys a Quantum Computer

#8

Post by Jach »

lmm wrote: post #3

Have D-Wave demonstrated any actual quantum behaviour yet? I had them down as a scam prior to the google involvement; now I'm not sure what to think.

Not that I know of, but my most recent information comes from this over-a-year-old post: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=954 Google buying one doesn't make me shift much one way or another -- D-Wave has built something interesting that seems to be faster than other hardware, they are able to improve from the marketing buzz around 'quantum', but may or may not be using any quantum effects. People like http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/ have algorithms for problems that do increasingly better than the competition with increasingly "harder" or larger instances, so that behavior isn't really that weird.

Re: Google Buys a Quantum Computer

#9

Post by i_am_dead »

Ygg2 wrote: post #4
lmm wrote: post #3

Have D-Wave demonstrated any actual quantum behaviour yet? I had them down as a scam prior to the google involvement; now I'm not sure what to think.

There have been some calculations that are consistent with entaglement which is a premise for quantum behavior. However D-Wave isn't a general quantum computer. It's an adiabatic quantum computer. I'm pretty sure it can't solve Shor's algorithm, because it only does function optimizations.

D-Wave does have a factoring algorithm. See the comments from D-Wave here:

http://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/learning-to-program-th...

"We do have a factoring algorithm that I’m going to do a series of blog posts on"

Re: Google Buys a Quantum Computer

#10

Post by carlob »

Recently I read an article [1] about this, and it seems that D-Wave has a large advantage in optimization problems that pop up often in machine learning.

I think this is a lot less esoteric than it sounds: a company develops a computer that is a lot faster at optimizing using a quantum trick, we do classical machine learning faster. I'm pretty certain they're not doing anything qualitatively different than before. No (largely debunked) Penrose theories on quantum consciousness, sorry.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23519-commercial-quant...

Post reply on HN