DWAVE is building quantum computers with multiple thousands of qubits, and has been for several years. Why is this news?
Thanks. I wasn't familiar with that company until you mentioned them. But since Science News is a fairly reputable scientific source, I figured 'something' wasn't quite kosher here. So I looked it up and found this...
"Their claimed speedup over classical algorithms appears to be based on a misunderstanding of a paper my colleagues van Dam, Mosca and I wrote on "The power of adiabatic quantum computing."
That speed up unfortunately does not hold in the setting at hand, 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."
Wim van Dam, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, summarized the scientific community consensus as of 2008 in the journal Nature Physics:[55]
″At the moment it is impossible to say if D-Wave's quantum computer is intrinsically equivalent to a classical computer or not.
So until more is known about their error rates, caveat emptor is the least one can say″.
An article in the May 12, 2011 edition of Nature gives details which critical academics say proves that the company's chips do have some of the quantum mechanical properties needed for quantum computing.[56][57]
Prior to the 2011 Nature paper, D-Wave was criticized for lacking proof that its computer was in fact a quantum computer.
Nevertheless, questions were raised[58] and later answered[59] regarding experimental proof of quantum entanglement inside D-Wave devices.
Former MIT professor Scott Aaronson, who has described himself as "Chief D-Wave Skeptic", said that D-Wave's 2007 demonstration did not prove anything about the workings of the Orion computer, and that its marketing claims were deceptive.[60]
In May 2011 he said that he was "retiring as Chief D-Wave Skeptic",[61] and reporting his "skeptical but positive" views based on a visit to D-Wave in February 2012.
Aaronson said that one of the most important reasons for his new position on D-Wave was the 2011 Nature article.[58][62][63]
In May 16, 2013 he resumed his skeptic post.
He criticizes D-Wave for blowing results out of proportion on press releases that claim speedups of three orders of magnitude, in light of a paper[38] 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.[37]
On May 16, 2013 NASA and Google, together with a consortium of universities, announced a partnership with D-Wave to investigate how D-Wave's computers could be used in the creation of artificial intelligence.
Prior to announcing this partnership, NASA, Google, and Universities Space Research Association put a D-Wave computer through a series of benchmark and acceptance tests, which it passed.[14]
Independent researchers found that D-Wave's computers could solve some problems as much as 3,600 times faster than particular software packages running on conventional digital computers.[14]
Other independent researchers found that different software packages running on a single core of a desktop computer can solve those same problems as fast or faster than D-Wave's computers (at least 12,000 times faster for quadratic assignment problems, and between 1 and 50 times faster for quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems).[64]
In January 2014 researchers at UC Berkeley and IBM published a classical model reproducing the D-Wave machine's observed behavior, suggesting that it may not be a quantum computer.[65]
In March 2014, researchers at University College London and the University of Southern California (USC) published a paper comparing data obtained from a D-Wave Two computer with three possible explanations from classical physics and one quantum model.
They found that their quantum model was a better fit to the experimental data than the Shin–Smith–Smolin–Vazirani classical model, and a much better fit than any of the other classical models.
The authors conclude that "This suggests that an open system quantum dynamical description of the D-Wave device is well-justified even in the presence of relevant thermal excitations and fast single-qubit decoherence." [66]
In May 2014, researchers at D-Wave, Google, USC, Simon Fraser University, and National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University published a paper containing experimental results that demonstrated the presence of entanglement among D-Wave qubits.
Qubit tunneling spectroscopy was used to measure the energy eigenspectrum of two and eight-qubit systems, demonstrating their coherence during a critical portion of the quantum annealing procedure.[67]
A study published in Science in June 2014,[68] described as "likely the most thorough and precise study that has been done on the performance of the D-Wave machine"[69] and "the fairest comparison yet", attempted to define and measure quantum speedup.
Several definitions were put forward as some may be unverifiable by empirical tests, while others, though falsified, would nonetheless allow for the existence of performance advantages.
The study found that the D-Wave chip "produced no quantum speedup" and did not rule out the possibility in future tests.[70]
The researchers, led by Matthias Troyer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, found "no quantum speedup" across the entire range of their tests, and only inconclusive results when looking at subsets of the tests. Their work illustrated "the subtle nature of the quantum speedup question."
Further work[71] has advanced understanding of these test metrics and their reliance on equilibrated systems, thereby missing any signatures of advantage due to quantum dynamics.
There are many open questions regarding quantum speedup. The ETH reference in the previous section is just for one class of benchmark problems.
Potentially there may be other classes of problems where quantum speedup might occur. Researchers at Google, LANL, USC, Texas A&M, and D-Wave are working to find such problem classes.[72]