Welcome to the future?

[2timer]

D-Wave, a Canadian company, has created what some are calling the "world's first commercially available quantum computer." It has 512 qubits which allow for computations on a quantum level. In order for this to be possible, however, the chip must have almost zero electrical resistance, and be cooled to almost absolute zero. D-Wave list of customers so far is short but powerful : NASA, Google, the CIA, Lockheed Martin, and potentially more.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkna...artner-to-purchase-a-d-wave-quantum-computer/

http://mobile.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22554494

Quote from article:

In one case [of a particular type of computation] it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes.

 

[SunRe]

There are many, many high-profile theorists of quantum computing that have argued in absence of more details that D-Wave is at best a highly optimized classical computer.

This month some further details started to emerge and the latest assessment that I believe is representative for the university theorists is this:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400

To make it short, there appears there is some compelling evidence that entanglement actually might happen inside D-Wave's chip (an actual quantum phenomenon) but overall the speedups seem to indicate that it's only doing some sort of classical optimizations.

Actually progress has been slow in the field read the article above it's quite interesting.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Welcome to 2011

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2167544

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Not a true quantum computer - you can't run Shor's algorithm it.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Muscle flexing?