D-Wave’s Quantum Computing Demo

As I men­tioned earlier, there was a Cana­dian com­pany that announced it would demon­strate a work­ing quantum com­puter this week. And demon­strate they did. Yes­ter­day. In Cali­for­nia. Then they released this press release, which is frus­trat­ingly short on details.

There was some other minor press cov­er­age, includ­ing a short art­icle in Sci­entific Amer­ican. The nub:

For the demon­stra­tion, he says D-Wave oper­at­ors remotely con­trolled the quantum com­puter, housed in Burn­aby, Brit­ish Columbia, from a laptop in Cali­for­nia. The quantum com­puter was given three prob­lems to solve: search­ing for molecu­lar struc­tures that match a tar­get molecule, cre­at­ing a com­plic­ated seat­ing plan, and filling in Sudoku puzzles.

But experts say the announce­ment may be a bit — er — pre­ma­ture. Even if the com­puter were to work as advert­ised, it still would be nearly 1,000 times too small to solve prob­lems that stump ordin­ary com­puters. Moreover, research­ers do not know whether it will work at big­ger sizes.

A sim­ilar tone was in most other art­icles that didn’t par­rot the press release — namely, that the demo was not very impress­ive. That part is rather unfor­tu­nate, although not wholly unex­pec­ted — the com­pany did indic­ate (some­where) that this was inten­ded to be a proof of concept to gain interest.

So I guess at least for the fore­see­able future, the cryp­to­graphy industry will still be around.

related:

1. Thoughts on Quantum Computing
2. A Real Quantum Com­puter  —  This Week!
3. cana­dian export con­trols now apply to quantum cryptography
4. Pre­texting, Eth­ics and Clients
5. Wiki­al­ity  —  Part III