More D-Wave Claims

For those who have not seen it yet, D-Wave is making some new claims. I've been skeptical since 2007, and still feel the same way. I think Scott Aaronson described the situation well in his blog, as he usually does about D-Wave.

Wired Magazine- Tech that never took: quantum computing

There's a recent story on Wired titled Tech That Never Took, within it is a short section on quantum computing (third one down here) by Tomas Hayden. It falls under the "tech that never took" category because the idea was introduced nearly three decades ago and our physical implementations are currently only a few handful of qubits at best. In the article Aaronson points out that the hard part of making a quantum computer is decoherence. When building a quantum computer you can think of this problem as basically being an unintended interaction with the environment which results in the state of the quantum computer not being maintained.

It is true that we've been working on it for a long time, but I disagree that quantum computing falls under the category of "tech that never took". It is taking us a long time because it is a really hard problem. Take another hard problem, developing the atomic bomb for example. It took a long time to create one, and we only did so when we did because of the huge amount of resources poured into the Manhattan Project. Another example is classical computers: much more than 3 decades elapsed between Charles Babbage's Difference Engine and the first real computers in the mid-twentieth century. My point is that just because it takes a long time to tackle a problem doesn't mean it will "never [take]".

Additionally we continue to make progress towards quantum computers, as I've outlined multiple times. My area is quantum software, not constructing the hardware, but I'd guess we're around a decade out from our first practical quantum computers. I'd also disagree with several of the other subjects listed in the article: nanotechnology, fusion power, personalized medicine, and self driving cars to name the most glaring ones to me. Given time, we've tackled some amazing problems, I don't see why these and quantum computing will be any different. Before 1903 there wasn't even powered flight by man, by 1969 we were landing people on the Moon.

D-Wave and Google

Google teaming up with D-Wave has been making a lot of noise lately. I wasn't originally going to write anything about it, until I came across a recent post by Scott Aaronson titled "Hopefully my last D-Wave post ever". I thought the way he wrote it was humorous- I liked the fictional interchange. I recommend reading both the post and comments.

I don't really have too much more to add other than to quote Carl Sagan: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" [1]. We're still waiting for the extraordinary evidence from D-Wave.

References

[1] C. Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, 1 ed. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1997.