A new quantum computing blog! Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave (the British Columbia company questing to build a quantum computer) now has a blog called rose.blog. Geordie certainly named the blog after his last name, but when I read that title, I hear “Rosebud” and want to go sledding.
O brave new quantum world!
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the mention! Blogging is fun.
I’d like to be able to use the blog to (1) talk about what we’re building and (2) get people to think about applications for our machines. We’ve built one app already which is very cool, but there are too many potential apps for an NP-hard “hardware heuristic” for one little organization to look at seriously. Maybe we should open source the hardware.
Also as much as possible I’m going to try to keep my descriptions etc. as easy to follow for non-specialists as I can, at the risk of offending specialists – we’ll see how this works out.
Re: Rosebud… Yeah. Damn… now I feel like pining for my lost childhood innocence…
They can’t be serious. Too bad they’re not public. Great shorting opportunity.
Well, technically there is sort of a way to short them as some of their funding comes from a publically traded VC firm, TINY (I hope the D-Wave people won’t hate me for pointing this out! If EMD is wrong in fact people shorting will just make them richer, right?!) Of course shorting TINY might be crazy as D-Wave does not make up all of their investments. And, of course, you’d have to be pretty certain that they aren’t onto anything. Right now they are pretty tight lipped.
Dave, Come on. Funny how it’s supposedly been around since 1999, but somehow the “scientific team” and “scientific advisory board” links give you a “currently unavailable” message. Funny how there are a couple of physics people listed, but not a single one lists any research done specifically in quantum information.
Plus why do you care what the people at this place think about you? It’s not in your long term interest to cozy up to hollow PR-machines. You don’t want quantum info to be the next string theory, do you? Because it’s got a decent start already.
. Funny how there are a couple of physics people listed, but not a single one lists any research done specifically in quantum information
Well they certainly are working on something, I think. See, for example, here http://www.dwavesys.com/PDFs/20050814_Province.pdf where at least there are pictures of some actually experimental setups. And their are certainly a few publications to their accord (on the theory side there is the very nice paper http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604193l and for an experimentalish paper see http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0605588 ) So if they are simply hollow PR, then I think they are at least a hollow PR machine which can write physics articles (which in my more cynical periods I might think also describes academia đŸ˜‰ )
My impression from what I’ve read is that they are trying to build a superconducting quantum computer which can execute adiabatic quantum algorithms. My only worry about this is that so far, while we know that adiabatic quantum computers are universal, we do not know whether they are fault-tolerant.
Plus why do you care what the people at this place think about you?
True, true! I don’t care what they think about me hence all my silly pontificating! I do, however, wish them good luck. On the other hand, as you mention, I do worry that an unsuccessful attempt at building a quantum computer will hurt quantum computing in the long run. Until there is a stampeed of startups attempting to build a quantum computer, however, I don’t quite feel the need to worry about this. Exactly how many companies are trying to build a quantum computer (exclude quantum crypto from this list)?
And comparing string theory and quantum computing is a little premature until physics departments actually give jobs to quantum information theorists, no? đŸ™‚
What languages are you using to express problems to this computer. What differences in emphasis do you require require to change from an underlying dependency on bits to qbits.