Lockheed Martin pays $10M for D-Wave's Quantum Computer(vancouversun.com) |
Lockheed Martin pays $10M for D-Wave's Quantum Computer(vancouversun.com) |
God damn I hate bullshit lines like this used about QCs. The whole article is gives the usual misleading impression of QCs being generically faster than normal computers.
They're not.
They can answer some problems much, much faster than traditional non-QC computers because they are capable of running classes of algorithm that rely on quantum effects.
Don't get me wrong - that's a pretty darn useful subset of problems... the future of QCs is full of rosy cool stuff... but this isn't just like upping the clock cycles of a CPU.
It doesn't make everything faster. Completely different classes of constraint are being tweaked.
QCs aren't going to make everybody's laptop or smartphone rilly rilly fast.
To clarify, D-Wave has not developed a general-purpose quantum computer, and in fact the term "general purpose" is kind of ill-defined for quantum computing anyway. Right now, there are a lot of different quantum effects that are used in different ways to accomplish specific tasks. I believe D-Wave's device uses quantum annealing to solve certain optimization problems, but someone check me if I'm wrong.
The little I do know about quantum computing relates to my area of study: simulation. The computation required to exactly solve the Schrodinger equation scales with 2^N for the number of particles (or whatever basis the equation is set in). Even the largest supercomputers are incapable of doing more than a few atoms [which, incidentally, is actually what I'm attempting to accomplish right now for a project that I should be working on instead of posting on here...] Anyway, with quantum computers, the scale would be O(N) instead of O(2^N), so you could perform incredibly accurate simulations that reach chemical accuracy. Chemical accuracy is kind of the holy grail of simulation, because what it means is that you can predict actual, macroscopic chemical properties of a variety of substances without doing any real-world experiments whatsoever. I believe it has been accomplished for things like pure hydrogen and quite a few bosonic systems (bosons are easier to simulate since they don't suffer from the fermion sign problem - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_sign_problem).
Anyway, I probably sound like I know more than I really do, but hopefully this gives you an idea of what kind of applications a real, working quantum computer could be used to achieve.
I think the only part of "general-purpose quantum computer" D-Wave can claim is the "computer" part. They have not proven that any part of their annealing is "quantum". They have pretty epic lithography/fabrication skills, and are barreling ahead without any regard for coherence. They also have just an insane number of control lines, so there's some innovation there.
But their net worth becomes negative if you count the bad press for quantum computing in having a charlatan claim they have 1024 qubits and are "500,000" times faster at solving Sudoku. Other fields are having this PR problem too, where even careful program reviews are getting brutalized by the PR news cycle (see recent dark-matter experiment: http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/04/03/ams-presents-some-fi... -- forgive the typography)
Is it possible that in the future rather than having a sort of general "quantum computer", something like quantum processors will be built for specific computing tasks? Each very different in config and unique, specifically designed and used for one thing and one thing only?
This is useful becaue it would mean that we could see exactly how reactions take place and perhaps even engineer interesting chemical/biological phenomena. Certain processes in your body depend on proteins moving certain substances or reacting in certain ways, and if we can simulate all that with a computer, we can start to build chemical/biological tools for, for example, fighting certain diseases
Well - it's more that there are entire classes of things that we can't simulate in any reasonable amount of time that (in theory) QCs should be very good at.
Protein folding for example. Finding the lowest energy state that protein's fold into is really, really hard and slow. QCs can theoretically do it very, very quickly. This opens up whole areas of experimentation and validation that are closed to us at the moment because the feedback cycle on solutions is so darn slow and/or inaccurate.
Protein folding errors are at the heart of diseases like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinsons. QCs capable of simulating the chemistry involved would be a huge help in attacking those problems.
> Quantum computers operate at speeds unattainable by even today’s most powerful supercomputers, operations that are so fast, they can process millions of calculations in a fraction of the months, even years, traditional computers take.
Quantum computers can carry out some algorithms which normal computers can't, which can be much faster, but they're not usable for general computing so this statement makes no sense.
> They can even be taught and can recognize objects in images, a task standard computers struggle with.
Er... what? I wouldn't say that standard computers can do vision easily, but it's a problem of finding the right algorithms, not computing power.
Will some clients be wildly overpaying for something they could do equally well on regular computers? Sure, and they'll love every $ of it because of the bragging rights. Is this an efficient use of the hardware? Certainly not, it'll probably be exploiting <1% of the system's potential. Doesn't matter. People will frequently pay more for novelty than actual utility. If their vanity subsidizes the tiny subset of research computation that would have serious economic benefits, I call that a win-win.
b) Buy this book to get going: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Simple-Matrix-Physic...
c) Then buy this one to scare professors: http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Classical-Quantum-Physics-...
How much power do quantum computers use and when will they be affordable enough to put in a smartphone/tablet?
And why isn't any other company doing this?
It's probably not worthwhile for quantum computing chips to enter the consumer market, because (AFAIK) quantum computers are only very good at solving a very specific set of problems (e.g. integer factorization), but their advantages over classical chips diminish (or even become negative) for general purpose computation. Of course as quantum chips develop, quantum algorithms will develop/evolve with them so that might change.
There have been some skepticism over whether their quantum computing chip (and similar ones that other companies develop) is actually a quantum computer (e.g. whether true quantum entanglement was observed).
There are other companies doing this, such as IBM.
Yer qubits get too warm and shakey in your pocket...
Nope.
First, as I understand it, the D-Wave stuff isn't a system that can run Shor's.
Second, Shor's only ruins security for a certain class of crypto algorithm. There are already algorithms that exist today that a proof against it (e.g the McEliece cryptosystem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem).
Third, if you're really worried about the man cracking your s3cr3t stuff with quantum computers go pick the right cryptosystem ;-) Plenty of symmetric encryption systems that only get their key lengths reduced (effectively halved) by Grover's algorithm.
And to be fair, it's going to take a while to beat current computers. We've had decades to get them faster and faster, and we will need some time because we can perform low level operations nearly as fast and get enough qubits to get to sizes of problems that classical computers have issues with
Yes, I'm well aware. The difference from D-wave is that the labs at IBM, UCSB, and Yale haven't claimed they've built a quantum computer (mostly).
> What is clear though, is that quantum computers have already solved problems in fewer steps than classical computers.
This is statement is false and probably not even interpretable in a sensible way. See, for instance, my esteemed colleagues on why some labs' claims to have factored small numbers like 15 are bogus:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.7007
> And to be fair, it's going to take a while to beat current computers. We've had decades to get them faster and faster, and we will need some time because we can perform low level operations nearly as fast and get enough qubits to get to sizes of problems that classical computers have issues with
Although it will take a while, it will probably not be because classical computers are so great. I could be wrong (I'm no expert and there could always be scaling surprises), but I'm willing to bet it takes us longer until we perform the first quantum computation that can't be done by hand than between that time and the time when we perform a computation that can't be done with a classical computer.
The short version is that you're mistaken about how research in quantum computers has been progressing. There have been fantastic successes and advances, but they cannot be measured by "number of qubits" or "difficulty of computations done". There simply haven't been any real computation performed. You should think of researchers at the stage of still trying to get the first transistor to work, not the Moore's-law stage of trying to cram the 2^Nth transistor into the silicon.
http://www.gromacs.org/About_Gromacs
The aim of my question was to see if chemically accurate simulations come up with significantly different answers or to see if the current way of doing things is a good enough approximation.
Currently such investigations are limited in scope by the large computational resources required to perform a single quantum mechanical calculation on a molecular fragment. With quantum computers, tens of thousands of such calculations could be performed and the results could be used to optimize new molecular force fields through multivariate regression.
I thought both the D-Wave 1 & 2 both had specialist quantum chips that couldn't run Shor's.
They also implicitly state that it's not Shor's which is (to the best of my knowledge) the most effective integer factorisation algorithm for general purpose QCs currently know.
They also say that they "have a factoring algorithm". They don't say that it's actually implemented on running hardware.
I also notice the complete lack of clarification on the followup question that poked on the explicit "executed it on real hardware" question ;-)