There is a history of literally many years of bombastic claims being made by D-Wave (especially in the popular press) without anything to back them up. Scott Aaronson (<a href="http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/" rel="nofollow">http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/</a>), an MIT professor who is one of the better-known scientists in the quantum computing field, has written reams of pages about this. I would recommend browsing his blog if you are really interested in the claims and counterclaims about this company.<p>As for me, I will not waste a single minute reading an article about them, until they can convince the sceptics first. This may seem unfair (if people aren't willing to give them a chance, then how will we know if they've really made a breakthrough), but this company has earned this kind of treatment by bamboozling journalists and getting breathless press coverage based on nothing. Briefly, for years, they failed to even demonstrate that their machine exhibits any quantum entanglement at all; this makes it meaningless to talk about quantum computing on that machine, which didn't prevent press stories touting it as the next revolution in all of human existence. Since then, there have been some articles claiming that possibly there is some kind of quantum behaviour in the machine, but there was still no evidence that this quantum behaviour is doing anything meaningful in the actual computations. At some point, I stopped following the story.
<a href="http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1679" rel="nofollow">http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1679</a><p>"MAGIC 8-BALL: THE RENEGADE MATH WHIZ WHO COULD CHANGE NUMBERS FOREVER<p>An eccentric billionaire, whose fascinating hobbies include nude skydiving and shark-taming, has been shaking up the scientific world lately with his controversial claim that 8+0 equals 17 [... six more pages about the billionaire redacted ...] It must be said that mathematicians, who we reached for comment because we're diligent reporters, have tended to be miffed, skeptical, and sometimes even sarcastic about the billionaire's claims. Not surprisingly, though, the billionaire and his supporters have had some dismissive comments of their own about the mathematicians. So, which side is right? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle? At this early stage, it's hard for an outsider to say. In the meantime, the raging controversy itself is reason enough for us to be covering this story using this story template. Stay tuned for more!"<p>And seriously:<p>"we have <i>no idea yet</i> whether adiabatic optimization (the technology used by D-Wave) is something where quantum computers can give any practically-important speedup."<p>And how the results match those of the machine based on the classical (that is, not quantum) model:<p><a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7087" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7087</a>
Even if it solves some optimization problems well, it's not worth $15m. You can come up with the same solutions by spending far less money on way more CPU power. Plus it's a black box which has totally proprietary content you are not allowed to investigate based on some magical functionality. High on the PT Barnum Scale.
Interestingly, they develop some software in Common Lisp for their computer, here is a job offer from October last year: <a href="http://lispjobs.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/software-developer-d-wave-burnaby-bc-canada/" rel="nofollow">http://lispjobs.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/software-developer-...</a>
Ok HN, for those skilled in the art, is this real?<p>And what are the implications for cryptography? (isn't that always the refrain, "until quantum computers this is safe?")
D-Wave was covered a few months ago by Lev Grossman <<a href="http://time.com/4802/quantum-leap/>" rel="nofollow">http://time.com/4802/quantum-leap/></a> in a much more balanced piece.
I understand why the actual quantum effect is hard to observe, but I'm not sure I understand why the output is so hard to verify as being better or worse than a classical computer....<p>Can someone name the physical effect that this processor employs outside of any quantum effects that accounts for it possibly being faster than a room temperature "normal" computer?<p>What algorithms are they running to try to verify that the computer is quantum?
Does anyone know what local Quantum effects imply for the complexity of problems it can solve ?<p>I thought the watershed between a Classical computer and Quantum one was the ability to solve some hard problems believed to be in both NP and co-NP.
I suspect Betteridge's law applies -- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines</a>