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D-Wave System Passes Rigorous Tests

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday March 06 2014, @01:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the CQluaasnstiucmal-Superposition dept.

AnonTechie points us towards updates on the evaluation of D-Wave's annealing devices.

From Phys.org's reporting on the latest tests:

With cutting-edge technology, sometimes the first step scientists face is just making sure it actually works as intended. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering is home to the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC), a super-cooled, magnetically shielded facility specially built to house the first commercially available quantum computing processors; devices so advanced that there are only two in use outside the Canadian lab where they were built. The first one went to USC and Lockheed Martin, and the second to NASA and Google. Since USC's facility opened in October 2011, a key task for researchers has been to determine whether D-Wave processors operate as hoped using the special laws of quantum mechanics to offer potentially higher-speed processing, instead of operating in a classical, traditional way.

(Background at Time, for those unfamiliar.)

 
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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @01:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @01:42AM (#11774)

    I think there's a world market for maybe five of these computers...

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    But more for the future versions ;).

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Barrabas on Thursday March 06 2014, @02:54AM

    by Barrabas (22) on Thursday March 06 2014, @02:54AM (#11804) Journal

    I think there's a world market for maybe five of these computers...

    In case anyone didn't get the reference, Thomas J. Watson [wikipedia.org], head of IBM, was famously quoted as making that exact statement about computers in 1943.

    (Famously quoted, but perhaps apocryphal.)

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by omoc on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:57AM

    by omoc (39) on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:57AM (#11869)

    actually that is not too far fetched. Quantum computing machines can only be used for very specialized and _very specific_ tasks. For these specific tasks you can get a result incredibly quickly but you need to understand that it's not a general purpose CPU. You certainly cannot boot your favorite operating system on them and for most of your every day tasks like web browsing these machines would suck and do much worse than what we have now.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @07:27AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @07:27AM (#11873)

      But will it mine bitcoins?

      • (Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:58PM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:58PM (#12163)

        Yes and no.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.