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Comment on Performance of quantum computer no better than ordinary PC, say analystsparent

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They're also negative because no one has actually proved that the D-Wave is, in fact, doing any actual quantum computing. That's been the issue all along with D-Wave: no one can prove that it's really doing anything with those qbits.

It depends on your definition of quantum computing, the D-Wave does http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing and has been faster in some applications.

https://plus.google.com/+QuantumAILab/posts

They're just getting started, this field is very new, very difficult, and there are a lot of very smart people trying to answer the what/how/why/where/when of "quantum" computers.

The hardware outperforms off-the-shelf solvers by a large margin

"In an early test we dialed up random instances and pitted the machine against popular of-the-shelf solvers -- Tabu Search, Akmaxsat and CPLEX. At 509 qubits, the machine is about 35,500 times (!) faster than the best of these solvers. (You may have heard about a 3,600-fold speedup earlier, but that was on an older chip with only 439 qubits." [1]

[1] https://plus.google.com/+QuantumAILab/posts/DymNo8DzAYi

The hardware outperforms off-the-shelf solvers by a large margin

But it doesn't outperform classical algorithms specifically written to solve the types of problems that the D-Wave machine accepts.

Yeah, and I've never seen anyone outside D-Wave show these types of speedups. Last article I read, in fact, was struggling really hard to even show that D-Wave was the same speed as traditional algos.

Just like early digital computers couldn't out-perform specialized mechanical analog computers.

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