Lots of blogging and press picking up on D-wave and Orion so I thought I’d collect a few here. The offical press release is here. I’d love to hear from anyone who has attended.
Scott Aaronson called me a Chinese restraraunt placemat in his The Orion Quantum Computer Anti-Hype FAQ (Update (3:17pm 2/13/07): Scott’s post now contains an update by the great Lawrence Ip, who now works for Google.) Doug Natelson, who gave an excellent talk here at UW a few weeks ago, poses three questions about the D-wave demo. Peter Rhode is every bit the skeptic and beats out Doug Natelson with four points. Ars-technica’s Chris Lee takes a shot at explaining adiabatic quantum computation and uses the word deathmatch here. You can find a bad quantum computing joke at the end of this blog post. I find this post amusing, if for nothing more than bringing politics into quantum computing. Coherence* remains the prettiest quantum computing website and has a choice Seth Lloyd comment “I’ll be a bit of a skeptic until I see what they have done. I’m happy these guys are doing it. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
More mainstreamish media produces some truely incredible hype. One of my favorites is at physorg.com where we find the title a “New supercomputer to be unveiled” along with the choice gibberish “A Canadian firm is claiming to have taken a quantum leap in technology by producing a computer that can perform 64,000 calculations at once.” I flipped a coin 16 times today, can I get some venture capital? 🙂 Personally I like Gizmodo’s title: “D-Wave Quantum Computer to Span Multiple Universes Next Tuesday?” They also use the word sugerdaddy. If you want more reasons to be angry about hype or at bad journalism, go over to a wired gadget blog where you’ll find
There are certain classes of problems that can’t be solved with digital computers,” said Herb Martin, the firm’s CEO, over a decidedly-noisy digital cell phone. “Digital computers are good at running programs; quantum computers are good at handling massive sets of variables.”
Turing is certainly turning in his grave over that first sentence and, since Peter Shor is alive and well, I wonder if he is spinning today?
And don’t even get me started on this EETimes article. Choice:
Nondeterministic polynomial (NP) problems are the most difficult to solve on conventional computers because each variable adds yet another dimension to its possible solutions.
No, no, no! So many no’s I can’t even write it down. First of all NP problems include problems in P, so they definitely aren’t the most difficult to solve on a conventional computer. Second, the essentence of NP-complete problems is NOT just that you have an exponential search space. You’d think a Electrical Engineering rag would have taken some computer science courses? Then, of course EETimes only digs their grave deeper:
Quantum computers, on the other hand, can evaluate all possible solutions simultaneously and find the optimal solution, often in just a few clock cycles, thereby not only vastly speeding up the time taken to find the solution but also finding the most optimal result.
Okay, at that point I’ll admit I had to stop reading cus my brain was about to explode.
Oh, and whatever you do, don’t search for “first quantum computer” if you’ve ever performed a quantum computing experiment (that includes a lot of MIT Physics majors? Ack, is NMR quantum computation really quantum computation?) You might get a little miffed at all the years you spent in grad school doing what you thought were small quantum computer experiments.
) from my summer studing the diffuse instellar absorption bands as an undergrad.)