On Mar 31, 2016 19:24, "Jerzy Karczmarczuk" <jerzy.karczmarczuk@unicaen.fr> wrote:

Hello.

Le 31/03/2016 22:04, Scott Pakin a écrit :

My institution just bought a D-Wave 2X adiabatic quantum computer.
The problem is, no one really has a grasp on how to *program* an
adiabatic quantum computer.  It's a totally different beast from the
gate-model quantum computers that most people imply when they talk
about quantum computing.

I find all this a bit disturbing...
Los Alamos buys an expensive device that nobody knows how to use??

Moreover, in circumstances where the doubts about the real performance of the D-Wave computer stii persist?

Several physicists refuse to call this contraption a "quantum computer".  The statements about their "qubits" in their public materials are not always serious, there is practically nothing about a genuine state superposition, no educated physicist will buy such pseudo-definition as "having simultaneously the values 0 and 1" (being the result of two currents flowing in opposite directions ; what about phase?).

Their "white paper" about the map colouring shows a model which is more similar to a Hopfield (or similar) neural network, rather than a quantum computing device. The optimization is a natural application domain of such networks, but where are some more universal examples?

Surely, there are quantum elements in it: superconducting niobium rings, Josephson junctions, etc. But, actually, even a plain transistor is a quantum device as well, and nobody dares to call it a "qubit". Their native code seems to be extremely far from quantum theory, as we know it.

=
But, if the device works, has some affinities with neural stuff and with Monte-Carlo techniques (annealing), perhaps a good playground for testing it would be a Go player?

Jerzy Karczmarczuk
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