Subject: [extropy-chat] D-Wave premiere of 16 qubit processor

From: Damien Broderick <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:38:13 -0600

Their website cites today's demo in Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum:
http://www.dwavesys.com/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=4&cntnt01origid=15&cntnt01returnid=21

They're still claiming that < Quantum-computer technology can solve 
what is known as "NP-complete" problems > although critics have shown 
that this is an excessive claim for their own system.

Anyone there at the demo?

Damien Broderick 

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From: "John K Clark" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:25:38 -0500

"Damien Broderick" <[email-masked]>

> that this is an excessive claim for their own system.

If what they say is true then this is HUGE, far bigger than cold fusion
would be even if the damn thing worked, which it doesn't. However I have a
sneaky hunch the company is exaggerating their progress in this area just a
tinny tiny bit, but I sincerely hope I'm wrong. If I am wrong then the 
Singularity will happen much much sooner than anybody expected,
even Eliezer.

Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe that's a little too soon; the 
Singularity will be a meat grinder and I'm unlikely to come out 
of it in one piece. No matter, it's probably just a PR blurb to boost 
the company. Probably.

  John K Clark

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From: "Robert Bradbury" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:13:58 -0500

Interesting.  I believe D-Wave is funded by DFJ (e.g. with support from
Steve Jurvetson).  I doubt Steve would have supported D-Wave unless there
technology was fairly robust (Steve is on the board at Foresight and is
probably one of the brighter VCs in SilVal).  However I did point out to him
a year or two ago that there seemed to be a proof that there is an upper
limit on how long one can maintain QuBits in a coherent state (I think the
paper was from someplace in Europe).  The consequence being that the more
QuBits the smaller the time window one has to establish and maintain the
coherent state.  That would tend to place some interesting limits on the
size of the NP-complete problem that one can ultimately solve with quantum
computers in the real world.  I do not know whether anyone has attempted to
determine these limits to a greater extent.

Mind you I have never taken a course or read a textbook dealing with QM and
so everything of a technical nature in the above paragraph could be mere
gibberish.

Robert

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From: "scerir" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:50:52 +0100

> Anyone there at the demo?

<<Just came back from the D-Wave announcement. Unfortunately I had to leave
at the start of the Q&A session. Here's what I took away from it (minus the
marketing fluff):
- They claim to solve integer programming problems on their system. Geordie
Rose was careful to explicitly say that they are only hoping to see a
quadratic speedup. Herb Martin (the CEO) wasn't quite as careful in his
opening remarks but then he's the "suit". Geordie said that their current
chip is not a universal QC (presumably because their space of Hamiltonians
is limited) but with some work they expect to be able to make it universal.
- Geordie said compared their approach to the efforts in academia as similar
to Celera and the Human Genome Project. He said they were trying to get
something that would scale fast and worry about about the quality of the
qubits later. He contrasted this to the academic community's efforts to
achieve fine control over qubits before scaling up. They say that they hope
to reach 1024 qubits by the end of 2008.
- They demoed 3 "real-world" problems where they used their system as
essentially a blackbox IP solver.
- Searching for protein matches. Given a protein try to find the closest
match in a protein database. They serially fed all the items from the
database to the chip and asked it to score the match against the given
protein. They said it was solving a maximum independent set problem.
- Finding the best seating arrangement at a wedding reception. Given
constraints on which people can't be seated together and who wants to sit
together, find the optimal arrangement.
- Solving a Sudoku puzzle.
- At one point Geordie quoted you [S.A]. He excerpted a paragraph from your
SIGACT article (the one where you talk about generating Shakespeare's 38th
play) and mentioned your proposal of the inability to solve NP-hard problems
as a physical law. As far as I can remember, the only other computer
scientist he quoted was Gordon Moore so you're in good company. >>

See also
http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=1439
http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=198

But, wait, this seems more interesting ...
<< I'll pose this puzzler:  If quantum computers
are more efficient than classical ones
then why didn't our brains evolve to take
advantage of quantum information processing? >>
http://mattleifer.wordpress.com/2007/02/07/quantum-brains/

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From: "Robert Bradbury" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:37:17 -0500

I'm assuming S.A. is Scott Aaronson but that doesn't ring any bells in my
head.  Is he a QC wizz kid?

R.