[ExI] Google's Quantum Computer

[John Clark]

​Google's D-wave machine is not a general purpose Quantum Computer that can
work on any sort of problem, those are more difficult to build, but now it
looks like D-Wave's claim that it can solve "QUBO class problems"
dramatically faster than conventional computers may have some truth to it.
Interestingly protein folding is a QUBO problem and solving that would
revolutionize medicine and be a big stepping stone toward full scale
Drexler style Nanotechnology. Google just published a paper saying their
D-Wave can solve those type of problems 100 million times faster than the
regular computer:

​*"​*
*We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary
variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical
counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than
simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum
hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method
designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on
conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two
methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes
as high as 10^8.​"*

On the other hand Google's paper has not been peer reviewed yet, on the
third hand the regular computer was not using the most efficient algorithm
available, on the fourth  hand it does prove that the D-wave really is
using Quantum logic in its internal computations not regular logic, on the
fifth hand as the problem gets larger the advantage the D-Wave would have
over the regular computer would increase,

You can see the paper at:   ​

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.02206v1.pdf

​  John K Clark​
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