![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
As I put in the article, on January 19, 2007 D-Wave announced that they would be demonstrating the first commercial 16- qubit adiabatic quantum computer at two events, one at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California on February 13th, 2007 and the second at the Telus World of Science in Vancouver, Canada on February 15th, 2007. [1]
I am hoping that once the event has happened there will be enough interest in this topic that people who know a lot more about the physics, technical details, etc. will edit and add to to this and related pages. It may also be a good idea for someone to create a page about adiabatic quantum computers.
There is a lot of information out there. Here are some external links I have found through a Google search on "adiabatic quantum" and some sites:
.. and a lot more
MartinSieg 20:11, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
Needs update with mention of D-Wave's upcoming 256 Qbit chip, around mid 2012 & 512 Qbit chip, around 1 Jan 2013. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/dwave-systems-announces-512-qubit.html -- 59.92.162.251 ( talk) 14:50, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
I don't know how to express it, but this company's technology is vaporware and pseudoscience. There are several problems with both the hardware and the computation: (1) there has been no fundamental breakthroughs in the physics required to create a quantum computer (an immediate Nobel event) and (2) it is strongly suspected that quantum computing cannot solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. I am not a physicist so I will not address (1), however, I am a computer scientists (PhD), although quantum computing is not my particular field. Quantum computing is BQP and not NP, nor is there any known algorithm for computing NP-complete problems in Polynomial time on a quantum computer. If there are no NP->P transformations then this device is at no advantage to a classical computer so saying it `solved the traveling salesman problem' is a little misleading: answers to this problem can be computed in exponential time on a classical machine. I'm not sure how to say this other than that this article (and it's mention at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer) is highly suspect. I do not believe that the pseudoscience or fraudulent claims should be allowed in reference material. Would it be possible to mark this to make the reader wary?
Response: You raise some good points. However, you admit that you are neither a physicist nor a quantum computing specialist; whereas D-Wave employs several physicists and quantum computing specialists. Thus it's quite possible that they know something that you and the rest of us do not. Further, since D-Wave is a commercial enterprise, not an academic organization, the more significant their breakthroughs, the less likely they would be to reveal the details. So, hopefully, D-Wave will eventually demonstrate a system that behaves like some kind of "quantum" computer should and also performs as well as they predict. -- Red Cedar Salmon 20:46, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
Response: Wikipedia is a place for established fact, not speculative statements. Anyone can make an outrageous claim. Does that warrant a spot on Wikipedia? Of course not - it would quickly become an advertizing trick. It is entirely possible that an outrageous claim is true. But the burden of proof rests with those making the claim. In science, claims have merit only to the extent that they're verifiable - corporate secrecy is not a free ticket out of scientific scrutiny. Speculative articles such as this one are an embarrassment to Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.118.179.114 ( talk) 03:08, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Response: I think that if NASA and Google spent the money to buy DWAVE and the cost of refrigeration ($1 Million/year) it is highly doubtful that it is based on pseudoscience. A great number of scientists work for NASA and Google, I think they wouldn't be able to be fooled by these imposters! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:543:C002:1EA0:2136:BA99:3362:C883 ( talk) 14:46, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
Something can be "science", not "pseudoscience", and still not actually work. FTL travel doesn't work, either, yet NASA scientists have published work on that too. 69.43.35.98 ( talk) 21:01, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
According to the article, the company's CTO has stated that 'NP-complete problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get"'.
This strikes me as a very odd thing to say. As I understand it, all NP-complete problems are by definition in NP, which means that they must be exactly solvable, or their solutions could not be verifiable in polynomial time, which is one of the defining attributes of NP problems, even if you need a nondeterministic oracle to produce the candidate correct result. What's going on here? -- The Anome 10:00, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
By "probably not exactly solvable" he was stating that it was likely that P=NP is not the case. It's currently the case that solutions may be found to NP problems, but with a very high cost in terms of speed. 125.14.79.155 16:46, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
An earlier version of this article read like a company press release. I've toned it down a bit, but it still makes no mention of any of the skeptical opinions which have been expressed about this demonstration (for example, see [4]), and the apparent lack, so far, of independent technical verification of their results. -- The Anome 10:14, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
This article is a great example of where the Wikipedia principles fail. A typical mix pseudoscience with emotional bias, a hint of conspiracy theory and special interest paid writers. Reminds me of some esoteric articles. 134.3.129.7 ( talk) 21:12, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Thank you to The Anome for contributions to this page. I see that you also moved Orion quantum computing system here, which I agree makes sense, at least until there is consensus that it is a proven system of historical significance. I guess my original version sounded like a press release because most of the information I found on the web was written by Dr. Rose. That's why we need people who know more about the related topics to revise the page.
My limited understanding of NP-complete problems and what Dr. Rose was saying about them is that they are not solvable in polynomial time by any foreseeable technology, and it is already accepted that we can accomplish a lot with ansers that are "good enough". If someone can clarify this in the article, please go ahead.
MartinSieg 15:33, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
This includes criticism. WP is not a brochure. - Ste| vertigo 21:52, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps this article should be strictly about D-Wave, including its history, people, goals, claims, and of course how others view it (skeptics, etc.).
My intent for the article about the Orion quantum computing system, which was merged with this one, was to provide information about the technology itself. Perhaps we need an article on adiabatic quantum computing instead? I feel that the article Adiabatic process (quantum mechanics) is insufficient. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MartinSieg ( talk • contribs) 04:29, 15 February 2007 (UTC).
At the moment, the company and the product are inseparable, since so far, the Orion quantum computing system is not available for sale, and no-one has one, apart from D-Wave Systems themselves. When these machines are widely deployed, or become famous in a context that is separate from their creator company, then the product itself will of course deserve its own article, in the same way as any notable computer product. -- The Anome 10:01, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Yes, an NP-complete problem is in NP by definition, and is therefore a yes-no question by definition and is not amenable to approximate solutions. However, there are optimization problems that can be called FNP-complete: They are NP-hard, and if P = NP, then they are in (the function version of) P. What Rose means is that we should be happy with approximate solutions to FNP-complete optimization problems, even though exact solutions are out of reach, even with quantum computers.
However, there is a theorem from the 1980s that for many FNP-complete problems, in particular for the travelling salesman problem, there is a threshold beyond which approximate solutions are already FNP-complete. This is contrary to what some of the press releases from D-Wave imply. On the other hand, in some places Rose steps back from this implication, and says that his computer might only provide some speedup for optimization problems in FNP, maybe only a polynomial speedup rather than an exponential speedup. If so, it would have no real bearing on NP-hardness, because all such notions allow a polynomial fudge factor.
The disclaimers from D-Wave imply that the Orion is not really a quantum computer, but a quantum special-purpose device. If you set aside quantum mechanics for the moment, it is easy to understand that a computer is suppose to be general-purpose, or in technical terms, Turing-complete. If it is not Turing-complete, then it is an SPD. Likewise a quantum computer should be quantumly Turing-complete. Since there is no such claim in the case of the "Orion" device, it is at best a quantum SPD. You can call it clasically Turing-complete if you count the classical computer that controls it. The technical debate at the moment is whether D-Wave's demo has any strength even as a quantum SPD, or if it is really a classical facsimile.
If some company, D-Wave or Q-Wave or someone else, built a real quantum computer, it still would not be able to try all things in parallel and solve NP-complete problems. Quantum computing should really be thought of as "randomized computing on steroids". Randomized computing is a kind of parallel computing, in the sense that if you flip a coin, you can imagine parallel worlds in which the answer was both heads and tails. It is a weak kind of parallelism that has some computational value, but only a limited amount. Quantum computing is similarly limited, even though it is exponentially faster than classical computing (even the randomized kind) for certain structured problems such as factoring. It is NOT thought to be all that much faster for NP-complete problems. Greg Kuperberg 21:26, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
The article is all about the recent announcement of D-Wave's and not the company itself. Content around this was needed. Material from archived versions of company website added. Content arround Orion demos pushed down the page. The quote of Andrew Steane was made to the Guardian newspaper so that source should be found and cited. Positive opinion on the announcement along with a call for peer review was made by David Deutsch, citation needed. Shadesofgrey 00:47, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
Should we note that their name is most likely a pun on d-wave as in angular momentum state, d-wave superconductivity, etc.?-- Lionelbrits 16:40, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
Given the scepticism in the media coudl we say that D-Wave product are both Quantum Computers andNot Quantum computers, both at the same time? ;) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 135.245.192.10 ( talk) 08:27, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
For additional skepticism, see also: Shtetl-Optimized blog by Scott Aaronson [5] [6]- 69.87.200.74 01:43, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
For an interview with David Deutsch, expressing skepticism about what precisely D-Wave has achieved but optimism about the general prognosis for quantum computing, see: Wired 2007-02, The Father of Quantum Computing [7] Iain David Stewart 22:43, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
http://www.news.com/D-Waves-quantum-computer-ready-for-latest-demo/2100-1010_3-6217842.html?tag=newsmap - Ravedave 22:08, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
I keep an eye on slashdot and they recently posted an article referring to tomshardware that says Orion now has 28 qubits. See [8]. The only thing I'm not sure of is if this is a reliable source. Laptopdude Talk 05:14, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
Is this technology AQC, near adiabatic evolution (ie finite error) or something else. Published coments suggest that it is but D-Wave itself isn't being exactly clear on the matter. Here are three pro AQC citations. Perhaps, these are of use to some contributor.
Meglicki, Zdzislaw (2008). Quantum Computing Without Magic: Devices. MIT Press. pp. 390–391. ISBN 026213506X.
Kyriakos N. Sgarbas, 2007, "The Road to Quantum Artificial Intelligence" in T.S.Papatheodorou, D.N.Christodoulakis and N.N.Karanikolas (eds), "Current Trends in Informatics", Vol.A, pp.469-477, New Technologies Publications, Athens, 2007 (SET 978-960-89784-0-9)
G.P. Berman. A.R. Bishop, F. Borgonovi, V.I. Tsifrinovich, 2007 "Controllable Adiabatic Manipulation of the Qubit State" arXiv:0705.1255v1 [quant-ph] Shadesofgrey ( talk) 01:10, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
Some earlier versions of this article cited D-Wave's articles to counter balance statements that none of D-wave's has been shared with the physics community. Thus maintaining a NPOV. However, these were citations to the a pre-print server, whichis not what most would consider peer reviewed -- but it does have a referal system to qualify contributors. So citations were removed. However, it is clear that D-Wave has many peer review articles -- see below. Perhaps, these can be worked in beside comments like "which has not been published or shared with the physics community"
Phys. Rev. A 79, 022107 (2009); Int. J. Quant. Inf. 7, 725 (2009); Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 117003 (2008); Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 197001 (2008); Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 130503 (2008); Quantum Information Processing, 7, pp. 193-209 (2008); Phys. Rev. A 78, 012352 (2008); Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 060503 (2008); Appl. Phys. Lett. 90, 022501 (2007); Physical Review Letters, Volume 98, 177001 (2007); Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 057004 (2007); Quantum Information Processing 6, pp. 187-195 (2007); Phys. Rev. B 74, 104508 (2006); Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 047006 (2006); Phys. Rev. A 74, 042318 (2006); Science 309, p. 1704 (2005); Europhys. Lett. 72(6), pp. 880-886 (2005); New J. Phys 7, p. 230 (2005); Phys. Rev. B 72, 020503(R) (2005); Phys. Rev. B 71, 140505(R) (2005); Phys. Rev. B 71, 144501 (2005); Low Temp. Phys. 30, 661 (2004); Phys. Rev. A 70, 032322 (2004); Fizika Nizkikh Temperatur 30, 823 (2004); Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 017001 (2004); Phys. Rev. B 70, 212513 (2004); Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 037003 (2004); Phys. Rev. B 71, 024504 (2005); Phys. Rev. B 71, 064503 (2005); Phys. Rev. B 71, 064516 (2005); Europhys. Lett. 65, 844 (2004); Turk J Phys 27, 491 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 68, 014510 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 68, 134514 (2003); JETP Letters 77, 587 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 69, 060501(R) (2004); Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 097906 (2003); Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 097904 (2003); Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 117002 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 68, 144514 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 67, 100508(R) (2003); Phys.Rev. B 67, 155104 (2003); Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 127901 (2003); Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 037003 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 66, 214525 (2002); Phys. Rev. B 66, 174515 (2002); Quantum Information Processing 1, 155 (2002); Quantum Information Processing 1, 55 (2002); Physica C 368, 310 (2002); Physica C 372-376 P1, 178 (2002); IEEE Tran. Appl. Supercond. 12, 1877 (2002); Physica B 318, 162 (2002); Low Temp. Phys. 27, 616 (2001); Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 5369 (2001); Phys. Rev. B 63, 212502 (2001)
Shadesofgrey ( talk) 01:22, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
The article currently reads like the company has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be a scam and has published nothing on what it has done, which is not only non-neutral, but false. There is also very little recent information in the article, and a near void of information on their technology. My addition of a very brief description of recent technology based on peer-reviewed publications with links to them and their their pre-prints was instantly undone. Is there some reason for this information to be hidden? The existence of these publications (among many others, e.g. those cited by Shadesofgrey above) appears to contradict statements in the article now, so even if the publications should not be linked-to in the article, it seems that the article may not currently provide a fair and accurate description of the company or its work. I'll try to add a box at the top indicating that I think the neutrality of the article is questionable.
I fully acknowledge that I am not a neutral party with respect to this article, but apart from the photograph showing the existence of a real chip (also available at http://dwave.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/a-close-up-fully-wirebonded/) my addition only stated information published in cited peer-reviewed papers. Other photographs appear in those peer-reviewed papers, if those would be preferable. Ndickson ( talk) 20:44, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
Please propose here what changes and additions you would like made. Verbal chat 18:55, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
References
announcement
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Ndickson did not remove any of D-Wave's criticism (though many of them don't apply), but simply added facts, supported by peer-reviewed and published papers. If D-wave critics have a reason to doubt the correctness of any of the papers please share them with the scientific community. Otherwise stop undoing modifications that introduce uptodate and factual information to the wiki page.
Verbal, do you realise that saying something like "The problem is the lack of independent reliable sources" and at the same time removing references to published papers is a contradiction? You want to avoid anything that disproves your pre-conceived ideas, based on some opinionated blog entries? You are the one who has to defend yourself. Either prove the published papers wrong, or stop keeping this page out-of-date. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.13.217.230 ( talk) 19:20, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
Here is a link to D-Wave's list of peer-reviewed, published papers: http://www.dwavesys.com/index.php?page=publication-list It does include papers published prior to 2005 (invalidating a claim on the Wikipedia page). Any suggestions as to the best way of making this list available on the Wikipedia page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.13.217.230 ( talk) 20:45, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the addition of the list Verbal. I edited the page to emphasize that they are peer-reviewed, and also removed the statement about pre-2005 publications not being available. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.13.217.230 ( talk) 17:20, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
Here is an article in IEEE Spectrum about it: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/loser-dwave-does-not-quantum-compute/0
Key quotes:
"Even the best prototypes can't keep more than 10 qubits in entangled states for long. Because of this I am very skeptical of D-Wave's claims that it has produced a 128-qubit quantum computer, and talk of reaching 10 000 qubits at this point is advertising hype." -- Paul Benioff, physicist who pioneered quantum computing at Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois,
"D-Wave has made claims that have not been generally regarded as substantiated in the community." -- Anthony Leggett, Nobel laureate in physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Guy Macon ( talk) 07:16, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
This is very silly. Arguing about something that can be measured is a waste of time. It appears that some people are just not ready to accept a quantum break-though yet, no matter what. Skepticism is healthy, as long as it's not just an excuse to be lazy.-- SkipMcCormick ( talk) 01:42, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
Following the addition of the recent QC vs PC comparison source, I added the following text to the article (This claim is attributed to Catherine McGeoch in the article, although not quoted):
Based on a paragraph from the article:
An anonymous editor changed it to:
There are multiple problems with this formulation, all of which seem to erode its value:
Note that McGeoch was hired as a consultant by D-Wave, with the goal of coming up with a favorable comparison between quantum and classical computers. It's not a surprise to be that the comparison is unfair, but it's better to state explicitly in the article for balance. -- intgr [talk] 17:34, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I think the reason why the "algorithm" expression was used instead of the "conventional processor" expression is that it has been shown that you can get as good or better performance than D-Wave using a conventional processor with custom software packages designed to solve the problems D-Wave is good at solving. See my edit in the controversy section for the reference. 130.216.63.250 ( talk) 00:26, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
The criticism section is pretty flawed. It implies that after the google/NASA deal, all academic critics have stopped criticizing the company. This is not true. In general, the criticism section should be about the specific complaints of critics, and the response by the company - and a new impressive deal with google+NASA doesn't count as a response.
Another point which is often raised in discussions is that "pro D-Wave" views are based on published peer-reviewed articles, and the criticism is from blog posts and private discussions. While this is true, it risks leading to a dangerously distorted article. The peer review of D-Wave's articles doesn't mean that they are accepted as true, or as telling the whole story, but mostly that they are interesting and likely to be true, and to contain new science. On the other hand, criticizing D-Wave will rarely be publishable because it is hard to say "this company is full of BS" in a way that has new scientific content that a journal will want to publish. So we should be careful not to confuse publication with credibility here. Nevertheless, it is interesting that nevertheless people have found ways to make their D-Wave criticism into scientifically interesting articles; see e.g. arXiv:0705.1115. Aram.harrow ( talk) 01:14, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
energy of quantum and classical Ising spin Hamiltonians on planar graphs" which means we do not need to read the rest of the paper to know that this "criticism of D-Wave" is not strong at all. It was known since 1965 that Jack Edmonds' "blossom algorithm" can solve planar graph Ising models in polynomial time... but D-Wave's connectivity graph is non-planar. If the problem is planar: use a classical computer to optimize it. If the problem is non-planar, annealing on D-Wave might be faster (and probably WILL be more energy efficient) than solving the problem on a classical computer. Finally, I think any "criticism" of D-Wave right now is a bad idea because humans as a species still don't have enough knowledge to determine whether or not the claims of those critics will turn out to be relevant. You raise an interesting point about blog posts vs peer-reviewed articles, but I do think peer reviewed articles are in general much more valuable than blog posts and criticisms should be publishable in the journals just like you say that pro-DWave papers can be (and still be false or irrelevant, etc.). The criticisms of Umesh Vazirani, Scott Aaronson and Matthias Troyer in the article are all terribly wrong in my opinion. Umesh: "That speed up unfortunately does not hold in the setting at hand" ... why not? I see no reason why we can't get square root speed-up for a Grover-like search. Umesh: "and therefore D-Wave's "quantum computer" even if it turns out to be a true quantum computer, and even if it can be scaled to thousands of qubits, would likely not be more powerful than a cell phone" well now it has been scaled to thousands of qubits and it beat calculations on Google supercomputers that Hartmut Neven said in his talk at the APS conference in 2016 "spent millions of dollars of computer time to do" so Umesh's criticism about the "cell phone" has already been proven to be misleading. Scott: "blowing results out of proportion on press releases that claim speedups of three orders of magnitude, in light of a paper[40] by scientists from ETH Zurich reporting a 128-qubit D-Wave computer being outperformed by a factor of 15 using regular digital computers and applying classical metaheuristics (particularly simulated annealing) to the problem that D-Wave's computer was specifically designed to solve" show me one classical computation that can find the ground state of the Ising models in Katzgraber's paper faster than D-Wave's machine did. Show me just one. Matthias: "Matthias Troyer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said that they found "no quantum speedup" across the entire range of their tests" ... funny, his 2014 Science paper shows quite clearly a figure with the label "DW2 Faster" and another label "SA faster" meaning simulated annealing is faster.... and there were points labeled in the "DW2 Faster" region that were SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE away from the cross-over line... furthermore Katzgraber's and Denchev's papers BOTH confirm that Troyer's simulated annealing is not only orders of magnitude slower than D-Wave, but also scales with a worse slope, on a log graph. Dr. Universe ( talk) 00:02, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
The article says nothing at all about quantum algorithms. Yet a quantum computer can only run asymptotically faster than a classical computer by using a quantum algorithm such as Shor's factoring method, Grover's search method, etc. D-Wave claims that their quantum computer efficiently solves an NP-hard problem, namely quadratic unconstrained binary optimization or QUBO. However there does not currently exist any known quantum algorithm for solving NP-hard problems usefully faster than existing classical algorithms. Furthermore if any efficient quantum algorithm existed for NP-hard problems its implications for quantum computers would be vastly more profound than Shor's algorithm. Yet the article does not say anything about the quantum algorithm D-Wave is using. Something is very wrong here. Vaughan Pratt ( talk) 19:02, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
The lede does not reflect the content of the article, since it summarizes the press-releases of the company and presents them as facts. The article itself is more balanced.-- Ymblanter ( talk) 21:59, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
I propose that D-Wave Two be merged into this article. What isn't a press release or a quote from a press release is not much longer than what is already here. (I haven't researched whether "Two" was split from this article. It doesn't really matter, as they should be together.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:52, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
The criticism section is quite flawed and the quote by Umesh Vazirani is very out of date and flawed. It’s about time it gets removed. The Talk page has a criticism section, but it’s all discussion and no talk about change. VPL Strathcona ( talk) 20:49, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
This list still/again consists of people already mentioned, people who don't rate as among the most notable collaborators, and people who have never worked with D-Wave. As such I think it is best removed. Adking80 ( talk) 20:38, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
Ladizinsky goes around calling himself a co-founder but the article doesn't reflect this. Is he more of a "founder" in name because they gave him extra stock, or what? Where does this information come from and what is his own claim based on? 12.231.67.211 ( talk) 00:32, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
As I put in the article, on January 19, 2007 D-Wave announced that they would be demonstrating the first commercial 16- qubit adiabatic quantum computer at two events, one at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California on February 13th, 2007 and the second at the Telus World of Science in Vancouver, Canada on February 15th, 2007. [1]
I am hoping that once the event has happened there will be enough interest in this topic that people who know a lot more about the physics, technical details, etc. will edit and add to to this and related pages. It may also be a good idea for someone to create a page about adiabatic quantum computers.
There is a lot of information out there. Here are some external links I have found through a Google search on "adiabatic quantum" and some sites:
.. and a lot more
MartinSieg 20:11, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
Needs update with mention of D-Wave's upcoming 256 Qbit chip, around mid 2012 & 512 Qbit chip, around 1 Jan 2013. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/dwave-systems-announces-512-qubit.html -- 59.92.162.251 ( talk) 14:50, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
I don't know how to express it, but this company's technology is vaporware and pseudoscience. There are several problems with both the hardware and the computation: (1) there has been no fundamental breakthroughs in the physics required to create a quantum computer (an immediate Nobel event) and (2) it is strongly suspected that quantum computing cannot solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. I am not a physicist so I will not address (1), however, I am a computer scientists (PhD), although quantum computing is not my particular field. Quantum computing is BQP and not NP, nor is there any known algorithm for computing NP-complete problems in Polynomial time on a quantum computer. If there are no NP->P transformations then this device is at no advantage to a classical computer so saying it `solved the traveling salesman problem' is a little misleading: answers to this problem can be computed in exponential time on a classical machine. I'm not sure how to say this other than that this article (and it's mention at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer) is highly suspect. I do not believe that the pseudoscience or fraudulent claims should be allowed in reference material. Would it be possible to mark this to make the reader wary?
Response: You raise some good points. However, you admit that you are neither a physicist nor a quantum computing specialist; whereas D-Wave employs several physicists and quantum computing specialists. Thus it's quite possible that they know something that you and the rest of us do not. Further, since D-Wave is a commercial enterprise, not an academic organization, the more significant their breakthroughs, the less likely they would be to reveal the details. So, hopefully, D-Wave will eventually demonstrate a system that behaves like some kind of "quantum" computer should and also performs as well as they predict. -- Red Cedar Salmon 20:46, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
Response: Wikipedia is a place for established fact, not speculative statements. Anyone can make an outrageous claim. Does that warrant a spot on Wikipedia? Of course not - it would quickly become an advertizing trick. It is entirely possible that an outrageous claim is true. But the burden of proof rests with those making the claim. In science, claims have merit only to the extent that they're verifiable - corporate secrecy is not a free ticket out of scientific scrutiny. Speculative articles such as this one are an embarrassment to Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.118.179.114 ( talk) 03:08, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Response: I think that if NASA and Google spent the money to buy DWAVE and the cost of refrigeration ($1 Million/year) it is highly doubtful that it is based on pseudoscience. A great number of scientists work for NASA and Google, I think they wouldn't be able to be fooled by these imposters! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:543:C002:1EA0:2136:BA99:3362:C883 ( talk) 14:46, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
Something can be "science", not "pseudoscience", and still not actually work. FTL travel doesn't work, either, yet NASA scientists have published work on that too. 69.43.35.98 ( talk) 21:01, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
According to the article, the company's CTO has stated that 'NP-complete problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get"'.
This strikes me as a very odd thing to say. As I understand it, all NP-complete problems are by definition in NP, which means that they must be exactly solvable, or their solutions could not be verifiable in polynomial time, which is one of the defining attributes of NP problems, even if you need a nondeterministic oracle to produce the candidate correct result. What's going on here? -- The Anome 10:00, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
By "probably not exactly solvable" he was stating that it was likely that P=NP is not the case. It's currently the case that solutions may be found to NP problems, but with a very high cost in terms of speed. 125.14.79.155 16:46, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
An earlier version of this article read like a company press release. I've toned it down a bit, but it still makes no mention of any of the skeptical opinions which have been expressed about this demonstration (for example, see [4]), and the apparent lack, so far, of independent technical verification of their results. -- The Anome 10:14, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
This article is a great example of where the Wikipedia principles fail. A typical mix pseudoscience with emotional bias, a hint of conspiracy theory and special interest paid writers. Reminds me of some esoteric articles. 134.3.129.7 ( talk) 21:12, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Thank you to The Anome for contributions to this page. I see that you also moved Orion quantum computing system here, which I agree makes sense, at least until there is consensus that it is a proven system of historical significance. I guess my original version sounded like a press release because most of the information I found on the web was written by Dr. Rose. That's why we need people who know more about the related topics to revise the page.
My limited understanding of NP-complete problems and what Dr. Rose was saying about them is that they are not solvable in polynomial time by any foreseeable technology, and it is already accepted that we can accomplish a lot with ansers that are "good enough". If someone can clarify this in the article, please go ahead.
MartinSieg 15:33, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
This includes criticism. WP is not a brochure. - Ste| vertigo 21:52, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps this article should be strictly about D-Wave, including its history, people, goals, claims, and of course how others view it (skeptics, etc.).
My intent for the article about the Orion quantum computing system, which was merged with this one, was to provide information about the technology itself. Perhaps we need an article on adiabatic quantum computing instead? I feel that the article Adiabatic process (quantum mechanics) is insufficient. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MartinSieg ( talk • contribs) 04:29, 15 February 2007 (UTC).
At the moment, the company and the product are inseparable, since so far, the Orion quantum computing system is not available for sale, and no-one has one, apart from D-Wave Systems themselves. When these machines are widely deployed, or become famous in a context that is separate from their creator company, then the product itself will of course deserve its own article, in the same way as any notable computer product. -- The Anome 10:01, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Yes, an NP-complete problem is in NP by definition, and is therefore a yes-no question by definition and is not amenable to approximate solutions. However, there are optimization problems that can be called FNP-complete: They are NP-hard, and if P = NP, then they are in (the function version of) P. What Rose means is that we should be happy with approximate solutions to FNP-complete optimization problems, even though exact solutions are out of reach, even with quantum computers.
However, there is a theorem from the 1980s that for many FNP-complete problems, in particular for the travelling salesman problem, there is a threshold beyond which approximate solutions are already FNP-complete. This is contrary to what some of the press releases from D-Wave imply. On the other hand, in some places Rose steps back from this implication, and says that his computer might only provide some speedup for optimization problems in FNP, maybe only a polynomial speedup rather than an exponential speedup. If so, it would have no real bearing on NP-hardness, because all such notions allow a polynomial fudge factor.
The disclaimers from D-Wave imply that the Orion is not really a quantum computer, but a quantum special-purpose device. If you set aside quantum mechanics for the moment, it is easy to understand that a computer is suppose to be general-purpose, or in technical terms, Turing-complete. If it is not Turing-complete, then it is an SPD. Likewise a quantum computer should be quantumly Turing-complete. Since there is no such claim in the case of the "Orion" device, it is at best a quantum SPD. You can call it clasically Turing-complete if you count the classical computer that controls it. The technical debate at the moment is whether D-Wave's demo has any strength even as a quantum SPD, or if it is really a classical facsimile.
If some company, D-Wave or Q-Wave or someone else, built a real quantum computer, it still would not be able to try all things in parallel and solve NP-complete problems. Quantum computing should really be thought of as "randomized computing on steroids". Randomized computing is a kind of parallel computing, in the sense that if you flip a coin, you can imagine parallel worlds in which the answer was both heads and tails. It is a weak kind of parallelism that has some computational value, but only a limited amount. Quantum computing is similarly limited, even though it is exponentially faster than classical computing (even the randomized kind) for certain structured problems such as factoring. It is NOT thought to be all that much faster for NP-complete problems. Greg Kuperberg 21:26, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
The article is all about the recent announcement of D-Wave's and not the company itself. Content around this was needed. Material from archived versions of company website added. Content arround Orion demos pushed down the page. The quote of Andrew Steane was made to the Guardian newspaper so that source should be found and cited. Positive opinion on the announcement along with a call for peer review was made by David Deutsch, citation needed. Shadesofgrey 00:47, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
Should we note that their name is most likely a pun on d-wave as in angular momentum state, d-wave superconductivity, etc.?-- Lionelbrits 16:40, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
Given the scepticism in the media coudl we say that D-Wave product are both Quantum Computers andNot Quantum computers, both at the same time? ;) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 135.245.192.10 ( talk) 08:27, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
For additional skepticism, see also: Shtetl-Optimized blog by Scott Aaronson [5] [6]- 69.87.200.74 01:43, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
For an interview with David Deutsch, expressing skepticism about what precisely D-Wave has achieved but optimism about the general prognosis for quantum computing, see: Wired 2007-02, The Father of Quantum Computing [7] Iain David Stewart 22:43, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
http://www.news.com/D-Waves-quantum-computer-ready-for-latest-demo/2100-1010_3-6217842.html?tag=newsmap - Ravedave 22:08, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
I keep an eye on slashdot and they recently posted an article referring to tomshardware that says Orion now has 28 qubits. See [8]. The only thing I'm not sure of is if this is a reliable source. Laptopdude Talk 05:14, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
Is this technology AQC, near adiabatic evolution (ie finite error) or something else. Published coments suggest that it is but D-Wave itself isn't being exactly clear on the matter. Here are three pro AQC citations. Perhaps, these are of use to some contributor.
Meglicki, Zdzislaw (2008). Quantum Computing Without Magic: Devices. MIT Press. pp. 390–391. ISBN 026213506X.
Kyriakos N. Sgarbas, 2007, "The Road to Quantum Artificial Intelligence" in T.S.Papatheodorou, D.N.Christodoulakis and N.N.Karanikolas (eds), "Current Trends in Informatics", Vol.A, pp.469-477, New Technologies Publications, Athens, 2007 (SET 978-960-89784-0-9)
G.P. Berman. A.R. Bishop, F. Borgonovi, V.I. Tsifrinovich, 2007 "Controllable Adiabatic Manipulation of the Qubit State" arXiv:0705.1255v1 [quant-ph] Shadesofgrey ( talk) 01:10, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
Some earlier versions of this article cited D-Wave's articles to counter balance statements that none of D-wave's has been shared with the physics community. Thus maintaining a NPOV. However, these were citations to the a pre-print server, whichis not what most would consider peer reviewed -- but it does have a referal system to qualify contributors. So citations were removed. However, it is clear that D-Wave has many peer review articles -- see below. Perhaps, these can be worked in beside comments like "which has not been published or shared with the physics community"
Phys. Rev. A 79, 022107 (2009); Int. J. Quant. Inf. 7, 725 (2009); Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 117003 (2008); Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 197001 (2008); Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 130503 (2008); Quantum Information Processing, 7, pp. 193-209 (2008); Phys. Rev. A 78, 012352 (2008); Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 060503 (2008); Appl. Phys. Lett. 90, 022501 (2007); Physical Review Letters, Volume 98, 177001 (2007); Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 057004 (2007); Quantum Information Processing 6, pp. 187-195 (2007); Phys. Rev. B 74, 104508 (2006); Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 047006 (2006); Phys. Rev. A 74, 042318 (2006); Science 309, p. 1704 (2005); Europhys. Lett. 72(6), pp. 880-886 (2005); New J. Phys 7, p. 230 (2005); Phys. Rev. B 72, 020503(R) (2005); Phys. Rev. B 71, 140505(R) (2005); Phys. Rev. B 71, 144501 (2005); Low Temp. Phys. 30, 661 (2004); Phys. Rev. A 70, 032322 (2004); Fizika Nizkikh Temperatur 30, 823 (2004); Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 017001 (2004); Phys. Rev. B 70, 212513 (2004); Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 037003 (2004); Phys. Rev. B 71, 024504 (2005); Phys. Rev. B 71, 064503 (2005); Phys. Rev. B 71, 064516 (2005); Europhys. Lett. 65, 844 (2004); Turk J Phys 27, 491 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 68, 014510 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 68, 134514 (2003); JETP Letters 77, 587 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 69, 060501(R) (2004); Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 097906 (2003); Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 097904 (2003); Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 117002 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 68, 144514 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 67, 100508(R) (2003); Phys.Rev. B 67, 155104 (2003); Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 127901 (2003); Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 037003 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 66, 214525 (2002); Phys. Rev. B 66, 174515 (2002); Quantum Information Processing 1, 155 (2002); Quantum Information Processing 1, 55 (2002); Physica C 368, 310 (2002); Physica C 372-376 P1, 178 (2002); IEEE Tran. Appl. Supercond. 12, 1877 (2002); Physica B 318, 162 (2002); Low Temp. Phys. 27, 616 (2001); Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 5369 (2001); Phys. Rev. B 63, 212502 (2001)
Shadesofgrey ( talk) 01:22, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
The article currently reads like the company has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be a scam and has published nothing on what it has done, which is not only non-neutral, but false. There is also very little recent information in the article, and a near void of information on their technology. My addition of a very brief description of recent technology based on peer-reviewed publications with links to them and their their pre-prints was instantly undone. Is there some reason for this information to be hidden? The existence of these publications (among many others, e.g. those cited by Shadesofgrey above) appears to contradict statements in the article now, so even if the publications should not be linked-to in the article, it seems that the article may not currently provide a fair and accurate description of the company or its work. I'll try to add a box at the top indicating that I think the neutrality of the article is questionable.
I fully acknowledge that I am not a neutral party with respect to this article, but apart from the photograph showing the existence of a real chip (also available at http://dwave.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/a-close-up-fully-wirebonded/) my addition only stated information published in cited peer-reviewed papers. Other photographs appear in those peer-reviewed papers, if those would be preferable. Ndickson ( talk) 20:44, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
Please propose here what changes and additions you would like made. Verbal chat 18:55, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
References
announcement
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Ndickson did not remove any of D-Wave's criticism (though many of them don't apply), but simply added facts, supported by peer-reviewed and published papers. If D-wave critics have a reason to doubt the correctness of any of the papers please share them with the scientific community. Otherwise stop undoing modifications that introduce uptodate and factual information to the wiki page.
Verbal, do you realise that saying something like "The problem is the lack of independent reliable sources" and at the same time removing references to published papers is a contradiction? You want to avoid anything that disproves your pre-conceived ideas, based on some opinionated blog entries? You are the one who has to defend yourself. Either prove the published papers wrong, or stop keeping this page out-of-date. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.13.217.230 ( talk) 19:20, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
Here is a link to D-Wave's list of peer-reviewed, published papers: http://www.dwavesys.com/index.php?page=publication-list It does include papers published prior to 2005 (invalidating a claim on the Wikipedia page). Any suggestions as to the best way of making this list available on the Wikipedia page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.13.217.230 ( talk) 20:45, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the addition of the list Verbal. I edited the page to emphasize that they are peer-reviewed, and also removed the statement about pre-2005 publications not being available. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.13.217.230 ( talk) 17:20, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
Here is an article in IEEE Spectrum about it: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/loser-dwave-does-not-quantum-compute/0
Key quotes:
"Even the best prototypes can't keep more than 10 qubits in entangled states for long. Because of this I am very skeptical of D-Wave's claims that it has produced a 128-qubit quantum computer, and talk of reaching 10 000 qubits at this point is advertising hype." -- Paul Benioff, physicist who pioneered quantum computing at Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois,
"D-Wave has made claims that have not been generally regarded as substantiated in the community." -- Anthony Leggett, Nobel laureate in physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Guy Macon ( talk) 07:16, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
This is very silly. Arguing about something that can be measured is a waste of time. It appears that some people are just not ready to accept a quantum break-though yet, no matter what. Skepticism is healthy, as long as it's not just an excuse to be lazy.-- SkipMcCormick ( talk) 01:42, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
Following the addition of the recent QC vs PC comparison source, I added the following text to the article (This claim is attributed to Catherine McGeoch in the article, although not quoted):
Based on a paragraph from the article:
An anonymous editor changed it to:
There are multiple problems with this formulation, all of which seem to erode its value:
Note that McGeoch was hired as a consultant by D-Wave, with the goal of coming up with a favorable comparison between quantum and classical computers. It's not a surprise to be that the comparison is unfair, but it's better to state explicitly in the article for balance. -- intgr [talk] 17:34, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I think the reason why the "algorithm" expression was used instead of the "conventional processor" expression is that it has been shown that you can get as good or better performance than D-Wave using a conventional processor with custom software packages designed to solve the problems D-Wave is good at solving. See my edit in the controversy section for the reference. 130.216.63.250 ( talk) 00:26, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
The criticism section is pretty flawed. It implies that after the google/NASA deal, all academic critics have stopped criticizing the company. This is not true. In general, the criticism section should be about the specific complaints of critics, and the response by the company - and a new impressive deal with google+NASA doesn't count as a response.
Another point which is often raised in discussions is that "pro D-Wave" views are based on published peer-reviewed articles, and the criticism is from blog posts and private discussions. While this is true, it risks leading to a dangerously distorted article. The peer review of D-Wave's articles doesn't mean that they are accepted as true, or as telling the whole story, but mostly that they are interesting and likely to be true, and to contain new science. On the other hand, criticizing D-Wave will rarely be publishable because it is hard to say "this company is full of BS" in a way that has new scientific content that a journal will want to publish. So we should be careful not to confuse publication with credibility here. Nevertheless, it is interesting that nevertheless people have found ways to make their D-Wave criticism into scientifically interesting articles; see e.g. arXiv:0705.1115. Aram.harrow ( talk) 01:14, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
energy of quantum and classical Ising spin Hamiltonians on planar graphs" which means we do not need to read the rest of the paper to know that this "criticism of D-Wave" is not strong at all. It was known since 1965 that Jack Edmonds' "blossom algorithm" can solve planar graph Ising models in polynomial time... but D-Wave's connectivity graph is non-planar. If the problem is planar: use a classical computer to optimize it. If the problem is non-planar, annealing on D-Wave might be faster (and probably WILL be more energy efficient) than solving the problem on a classical computer. Finally, I think any "criticism" of D-Wave right now is a bad idea because humans as a species still don't have enough knowledge to determine whether or not the claims of those critics will turn out to be relevant. You raise an interesting point about blog posts vs peer-reviewed articles, but I do think peer reviewed articles are in general much more valuable than blog posts and criticisms should be publishable in the journals just like you say that pro-DWave papers can be (and still be false or irrelevant, etc.). The criticisms of Umesh Vazirani, Scott Aaronson and Matthias Troyer in the article are all terribly wrong in my opinion. Umesh: "That speed up unfortunately does not hold in the setting at hand" ... why not? I see no reason why we can't get square root speed-up for a Grover-like search. Umesh: "and therefore D-Wave's "quantum computer" even if it turns out to be a true quantum computer, and even if it can be scaled to thousands of qubits, would likely not be more powerful than a cell phone" well now it has been scaled to thousands of qubits and it beat calculations on Google supercomputers that Hartmut Neven said in his talk at the APS conference in 2016 "spent millions of dollars of computer time to do" so Umesh's criticism about the "cell phone" has already been proven to be misleading. Scott: "blowing results out of proportion on press releases that claim speedups of three orders of magnitude, in light of a paper[40] by scientists from ETH Zurich reporting a 128-qubit D-Wave computer being outperformed by a factor of 15 using regular digital computers and applying classical metaheuristics (particularly simulated annealing) to the problem that D-Wave's computer was specifically designed to solve" show me one classical computation that can find the ground state of the Ising models in Katzgraber's paper faster than D-Wave's machine did. Show me just one. Matthias: "Matthias Troyer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said that they found "no quantum speedup" across the entire range of their tests" ... funny, his 2014 Science paper shows quite clearly a figure with the label "DW2 Faster" and another label "SA faster" meaning simulated annealing is faster.... and there were points labeled in the "DW2 Faster" region that were SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE away from the cross-over line... furthermore Katzgraber's and Denchev's papers BOTH confirm that Troyer's simulated annealing is not only orders of magnitude slower than D-Wave, but also scales with a worse slope, on a log graph. Dr. Universe ( talk) 00:02, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
The article says nothing at all about quantum algorithms. Yet a quantum computer can only run asymptotically faster than a classical computer by using a quantum algorithm such as Shor's factoring method, Grover's search method, etc. D-Wave claims that their quantum computer efficiently solves an NP-hard problem, namely quadratic unconstrained binary optimization or QUBO. However there does not currently exist any known quantum algorithm for solving NP-hard problems usefully faster than existing classical algorithms. Furthermore if any efficient quantum algorithm existed for NP-hard problems its implications for quantum computers would be vastly more profound than Shor's algorithm. Yet the article does not say anything about the quantum algorithm D-Wave is using. Something is very wrong here. Vaughan Pratt ( talk) 19:02, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
The lede does not reflect the content of the article, since it summarizes the press-releases of the company and presents them as facts. The article itself is more balanced.-- Ymblanter ( talk) 21:59, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
I propose that D-Wave Two be merged into this article. What isn't a press release or a quote from a press release is not much longer than what is already here. (I haven't researched whether "Two" was split from this article. It doesn't really matter, as they should be together.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:52, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
The criticism section is quite flawed and the quote by Umesh Vazirani is very out of date and flawed. It’s about time it gets removed. The Talk page has a criticism section, but it’s all discussion and no talk about change. VPL Strathcona ( talk) 20:49, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
This list still/again consists of people already mentioned, people who don't rate as among the most notable collaborators, and people who have never worked with D-Wave. As such I think it is best removed. Adking80 ( talk) 20:38, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
Ladizinsky goes around calling himself a co-founder but the article doesn't reflect this. Is he more of a "founder" in name because they gave him extra stock, or what? Where does this information come from and what is his own claim based on? 12.231.67.211 ( talk) 00:32, 26 February 2021 (UTC)