Posted on 12/09/2015 10:50:14 AM PST by ShadowAce
Two years ago Google and NASA bought a D-Wave 2X quantum computing system and the Chocolate Factory has now pronounced itself very pleased with the results.
"We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core," Hartmut Neven, Google's director of engineering reported on Tuesday.
Now comparing almost any operation against a single core is a bit of a fudge, but the results show that Google and NASA certainly feel D-Wave's take on quantum computing is working. Many in the industry have suggested that D-Wave's claims about its systems were overhyped, but a paper [PDF] published by the Google team suggests otherwise.
The Chocolate Factory also ran tests on the machine using an algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo, which simulates running quantum problems on ordinary silicon and again, the results were up to 100 million times faster.
The decision to invest in D-Wave systems was a controversial one, since some in the industry think that the company has oversold the quantum abilities of its hardware. While it's significant that Google refers to it as a quantum annealing system, the company is still happy enough and, in September, signed a seven-year contract with D-Wave for more of its hardware.
Neven said there was still a ways to go with quantum computing, but that the tests had shown that existing hardware will work for certain tasks much faster than anything else on the market. How broad a range of tasks is something Google will be spending a lot of time finding out. ®
You’d make typos 10 million times faster, too. :-p
I think he’s going to buy one and just program it to read the news and screech for violating our civil rights whenever there’s a shooting. Doing it himself is cutting into his golf.
Looking for the like button...
Any info on the power consumption?
How do they measure it, with a stop watch?
Systems typically have a way of timing commands—both by cpu clock cycle and by wall clock.
I have not seen any info on that. That would be a good thing to know in regards to feasibility.
How many cups of coffee you can drink before IE can open MSN. That’s why you hear the unit “Java” mentioned so much in computer stuff.
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