D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a technology company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia, that gained news attention when it announced on January 19, 2007 that it had a commercially-viable working prototype of a quantum computer. The prototype is claimed to be a small (16-qubit) adiabatic-process quantum computer, that was demonstrated on February 13th, 2007 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. (The second demo is scheduled for February 15th, 2007 the Telus World of Science in Vancouver, Canada.[1]
The demonstrations were via video and not live, because D-Wave Systems claimed that the device was too delicate to transport and demonstrate. D-Wave Systems had not released its research to the scientific community, and as such physicists knowledgeble about quantum computing have expressed only skepticism. "My gut instinct is that I doubt there is a major `free lunch' here," said Andrew Steane, noting that the problem of adiabatics is a major technical hurdle that has not yet been feasibly solved even in theory.[1] D-Wave themselves admit that they "are not sure" if the device is actually doing quantum computations, instead stating that it simply may be using quantum mechanics to do essentally classical computation.
Description
These processors are part of their "Orion quantum computing system", which is a hardware accelerator designed to solve a particular NP-complete problem called the two dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field.[1] It is built around a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor.[2]
According to the company, a conventional front end running an application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem, such as pattern matching, passes the problem to the Orion system.
However, the company does not make the claim that its systems can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
According to Dr. Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave, NP-complete problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get" so the adiabatic quantum computer used by the Orion system is designed to produce either the exact solution or the next-to-best solution to a given problem in a short time, but we cannot know which. [3]
References
- ↑ a b Quantum Computing Demo Announcement. (HTML) 19. Januar 2007, abgerufen am 11. Februar 2007.
- ↑ , William M. Kaminsky and Seth Lloyd: Scalable Architecture for Adiabatic Quantum Computing of NP-Hard Problems. (PDF) 23. November 2002, abgerufen am 11. Februar 2007.
- ↑ Yeah but how fast is it? Part 3. OR some thoughts about adiabatic QC. (HTML) 27. August 2006, abgerufen am 11. Februar 2007.
External links
- D-Wave systems official website
- Announcement of the 16-qubit quantum computer demonstration
- IEEE Spectrum: Prototype Commercial Quantum Computer Demo'ed, 13 February 2007