[extropy-chat] D-Wave premiere of 16 qubit processor

[Robert Bradbury]

Interesting.  I believe D-Wave is funded by DFJ (e.g. with support from
Steve Jurvetson).  I doubt Steve would have supported D-Wave unless there
technology was fairly robust (Steve is on the board at Foresight and is
probably one of the brighter VCs in SilVal).  However I did point out to him
a year or two ago that there seemed to be a proof that there is an upper
limit on how long one can maintain QuBits in a coherent state (I think the
paper was from someplace in Europe).  The consequence being that the more
QuBits the smaller the time window one has to establish and maintain the
coherent state.  That would tend to place some interesting limits on the
size of the NP-complete problem that one can ultimately solve with quantum
computers in the real world.  I do not know whether anyone has attempted to
determine these limits to a greater extent.

Mind you I have never taken a course or read a textbook dealing with QM and
so everything of a technical nature in the above paragraph could be mere
gibberish.

Robert
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