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Perhaps every year or so I bring up the DWAVE web page (http://www.dwavesys.com/) to see what they claim to have. In the past, I have been impressed by their ability to sell pointless machines for millions of dollars each.
However, their current claims are interesting - representing a potential for purposeful work and lays down an architecture for continued processor development.
NASA and Google's Quantum AI Team have examined this new machine, with there thumbs up reported by the news media through many outlets over the past few days.
Some caution is needed in reading these articles. Here is an example article: http://9to5google.com/2015/12/08/go...n-that-d-waves-quantum-computer-really-works/. Note, in particular, that the "100 million times faster" assertion is useful - but can be readily misinterpreted. It's like saying that a transistor can perform a billion times faster than a detailed simulation of the transistor.
What's important is that the quantum process called "annealing" has been incorporated into a hardware system with the potential to do real work. And that NASA and Google have independently verified that the results are the actual results of quantum processing.
Of particular interest to software developers is this white paper describing how the DWAVE 2X can be programmed to solve the color mapping problem.
http://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/Map%20Coloring%20WP2.pdf
The algorithm demonstrates how the machine is programmed. It also demonstrates that sometime your algorithm will require more connections to a qubit circuit of single qubit than the hardware provides - and demonstrates a method for cloning these circuits to get past this limitation.
However, their current claims are interesting - representing a potential for purposeful work and lays down an architecture for continued processor development.
NASA and Google's Quantum AI Team have examined this new machine, with there thumbs up reported by the news media through many outlets over the past few days.
Some caution is needed in reading these articles. Here is an example article: http://9to5google.com/2015/12/08/go...n-that-d-waves-quantum-computer-really-works/. Note, in particular, that the "100 million times faster" assertion is useful - but can be readily misinterpreted. It's like saying that a transistor can perform a billion times faster than a detailed simulation of the transistor.
What's important is that the quantum process called "annealing" has been incorporated into a hardware system with the potential to do real work. And that NASA and Google have independently verified that the results are the actual results of quantum processing.
Of particular interest to software developers is this white paper describing how the DWAVE 2X can be programmed to solve the color mapping problem.
http://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/Map%20Coloring%20WP2.pdf
The algorithm demonstrates how the machine is programmed. It also demonstrates that sometime your algorithm will require more connections to a qubit circuit of single qubit than the hardware provides - and demonstrates a method for cloning these circuits to get past this limitation.