[HN Gopher] What are companies doing with D-Wave's quantum hardw...
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What are companies doing with D-Wave's quantum hardware?
Author : robin_reala
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-01-02 12:30 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Minor trivia: The first major public demonstration of D-Wave used
| a modified version of my PerfectTablePlan software to show how
| D-Wave could solve a seating plan optimization problem. Seating
| plans are a difficult combinatorial problem with N! possible
| solutions for N guests in N seats.
| theamk wrote:
| * * *
| OhNoNotAgain_99 wrote:
| [dead]
| fsh wrote:
| This is a very uncritical article that basically relies on
| marketing material of two companies (POLARISqb and SavantX). Most
| people in the QC field are extremely sceptical about D-Wave,
| since there is no conclusive demonstration that their system has
| any advantage over optimized classical algorithms.
| halJordan wrote:
| I remember a couple of years ago there was a kerfuffle about
| how Ars chose articles to write. I certainly don't remember the
| specifics, but it seemed like advertisers could commission puff
| pieces on a topic as a sort of a "rising tide lifts all boats"
| for whoever contracted the advertiser. This was how they
| claimed to avoid ethical concerns for writing the puff pieces.
| psychphysic wrote:
| I'm an outsider but still sceptical as NASA and Google turned
| to Dwave (circa 2013) and we saw pretty much nothing since.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| If Dwave managed to sell snake oil to NASA and Google, they
| have the best sales in the world.
| tasseff wrote:
| To my knowledge, it is an open challenge to find real-world
| problem instances where existing quantum annealers outperform
| state-of-the-art classical alternatives. It's even hard to find
| _extremely contrived families of instances_ where practical
| computational benefits can be observed with quantum annealing. I
| recently contributed to one such benchmarking manuscript [1],
| which may indicate future promise as the number of qubits in
| quantum annealers continues to increase.
|
| Anyway, as a result of that experience, I'm skeptical of the
| benchmarking efforts that led these two companies to the
| conclusion that quantum annealing is more cost-effective than
| dropping in a classical alternative as the inner optimization
| solver. D-Wave even has some reasonably efficient, open-source
| algorithms that can be used as a point of comparison (e.g., [2]).
| I'd be interested in reading more about the companies'
| benchmarks, as this article is very light on details.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.04291.pdf
|
| [2] https://github.com/dwavesystems/dwave-neal
| analog31 wrote:
| An interesting analogy that comes to mind is the electronic
| technologies that have tried to supplant silicon. I remember,
| perhaps as long as 40 years ago, reading that gallium arsenide
| could make faster transistors than silicon, and that we would
| soon have GaAs computers. Similar for other things like optical
| computing.
|
| But every time GaAs cleared another hurdle, silicon also moved
| forward, kind of like the tortoise and the hare. There are
| certainly uses for GaAs, such as microwave amplifiers, but no
| GaAs computers yet that I'm aware of.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Gallium nitride transistors used in compact power
| transformers.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| On the other hand we're looking at near-linear differences in
| speed with GaA, and it's easy to measure a pretty precise
| difference.
|
| It's hard to even demonstrate how quantum annealing scales at
| all.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| These days lots of Startups use phrases like "we are doing...",
| "we are making...", when in reality they mean to say, "we are
| researching how to be able to do/make...".
|
| It is not quite clear whether they have a working deployable
| product/service or whether it is R&D they are doing.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| krastanov wrote:
| To try to avoid confusion:
|
| Most of what DWave have done is making a special-purpose analog
| computer that happens to use some quantum effects (maybe). It is
| an interesting analog computer, but not necessary a useful one.
| There is some hope that what they are doing would lead to what
| everyone else calls "scalable quantum computer", but for years
| they have been quite misleading in what they say. They have used
| scientific terms like "quantum computer" in ways that have little
| to do with what the rest of the scientific community means. They
| have lost a ton of good will to the point that I personally am
| extremely mistrustful of any claims they make. What they have
| done has significantly damaged the trust that the public had in
| my field of research.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I've never understood how D-Wave is more than a "bathtub
| accelerator":
|
| - fill your tub with water
|
| - sit a computer at the edge that:
|
| - plays music, vibrating the walls
|
| - shines a light at the surface
|
| - records the surface in HD
|
| What does D-Wave _actually_ do that I don't, with my
| accelerator which solves the Bath Tub Problem faster than any
| classical computer?
|
| At least mine is demonstrably faster: a bathtub can in real
| time solve diffraction problems that would take minutes to
| hours on a high end cluster using ray-tracing.
| er4hn wrote:
| The summary is two case studies:
|
| - Searching for molecules with specific pharmaceutical effects.
|
| - Solving ordering problems for cargo ship offloading (which
| feels like a traveling salesman sort of problem?)
|
| All in all, I liked reading this article because it helps show
| places where quantum computing adds value by solving problems. I
| spend a lot of time in cryptography where the fear of quantum
| computing is that it will force a new class of slower
| cryptographic algorithms into use, so seeing positive uses of the
| technology is really quite nice.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I liked reading this article because it helps show places
| where quantum computing adds value by solving problems.
|
| The D-Wave is not a quantum computer. Quantum computers have
| quite different usage cases (but on the macro level, should be
| very useful to the pharma industry too).
| somat wrote:
| I like to troll and call our silicon base chips "quantum
| computers" because they work via a very quantum process, that
| is, the photovoltaic effect.
|
| They are not of course, and hopefully the smart people here
| can clarify what mechanically a "quantum computer" is doing,
| the best I can figure out is that it can reduce the complex
| valued quantum state down to a binary state and due to
| quantum interaction you can compute some things with this. If
| you asked me, it sounds like massive parallel computation on
| the atomic level, that is, similar to the way soap bubbles
| can solve minimal surfaces, but people keep assuring me this
| is not the case.
| dekhn wrote:
| Technically there are a number of architectures that qualify
| to be called Quantum Computers- you're probably just from the
| camp that does not admit the D-wave design as being one. Not
| all quantum requires require entanglement.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It is a quantum annealer, which is a less capable sub-
| category of quantum computer.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing
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