As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't work until Scott Aaronson says it works.<p>EDIT: My comment was kind of snarky and curt without much info; I need to be better about that. I did read Scott's post when it was published, and the consensus I got from it is that D-Wave's device achieves a constant-factor speedup, not a quantum one. I just think, with that being generally accepted by all parties now, it's pretty disingenuous to keep calling it a "quantum computer", when it's really a (faster) classical computer that uses quantum mechanical effects. I mean, the Intel chip in my laptop also uses QM effects because the feature size is so small, but nobody calls it a quantum computer. Maybe that's the media's fault though. Are D-Wave/Google themselves still saying "quantum computer"?<p>SECOND EDIT: Rereading Scott's post more carefully, it seems like Google and D-Wave are now calling it a "quantum annealing device" and are more forthcoming about the lack of quantum speedup. So unless they're talking out of both sides of their mouth and still saying "quantum computer" to the popular press to build hype, I guess everyone is a reasonable person after all and it's the media's fault as usual.
> We note that there exist heuristic classical algorithms that can solve most instances of Chimera structured problems in a timescale comparable to the D-Wave 2X. However, we believe that such solvers will become ineffective for the next generation of annealers currently being designed.<p>From the abstract.
I thought it wasn't considered a quantum speedup if you're talking about a constant factor. Otherwise, how are you going to jump across complexity classes?
talk about changing goal posts and pivoting, anything to save face about rushing success.<p>quantum everything is obviously the future of technology, but it is a long long path.<p>i get more excited about fundmanetal quantum research and research on new methods of testing quantum states.<p>people claiming to have full working computers of any value, if they even do work-------------are just blowing smoke and mirrors like elizabeth holmes from theranos. nearly criminal behavior , alleging things are simply what they aren't in order to get money.<p>there is an epidemic of hack science and engineering occuring to secure and suck in scarce funds. and where-ever there is military related big money the likelihood of fraud is even bigger.<p>read the book about the hafnium bomb and you will understand why the military investors are frequently so easy to scam---a two pronged version of greed and desire to have the unstoppable weapons.<p>paradoxically enough , if more pre-investigation was done, they'd have more money to spend on real R&D. i guess economists would just call this a massive case of malinvestment.
We changed the url from <a href="http://trendintech.com/2016/05/07/google-announced-their-d-wave-2x-quantum-computer-succesfully-works/" rel="nofollow">http://trendintech.com/2016/05/07/google-announced-their-d-w...</a> to one of the (more) original articles about this, that didn't specifially get discussed last year.<p>There were a few discussions at the time (e.g. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698317" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698317</a>) but perhaps the community is interested in more.