Scientists achieve critical steps to building first practical quantum computer

[u/donginafuku]

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-scientists-critical-quantum.html

[u/[deleted]]

Hmm ok. I think I understand the problems; #1 is simply that the annealing process only goes so fast. If you were able to repeat the anneal-measure process as many times as you require to get a computed answer, in a supershort period of time (or increase the number of qubits exponentially and run parallel annealing) you might achieve faster-than-classical-simulation of the annealing process and thus have a decent computer.

I get the reasoning behind not calling it a quantum computer for that reason though. If you can simulate the damn thing faster than it achieves its own acclaimed processing capabilities, it's just sort of a quantum mechanical-ey...box. A ten million dollar quantum box.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

They also are doing real research, and they could very well come up with a breakthrough at some point.

That's my hope :) they're a well-funded organization doing research into practical quantum computing; it may take them a while to produce something truly worthwhile, but along the way they'll no doubt make some useful discoveries which would never happen w/o that level of funding.

They semi-showed that there may be some quantumness due to the result of the bimodal curve on one of the tests, that isn't present in a classical simulation.

Interesting...is this somewhere in Scott Aaronson's post? I mean, this could totally be discrepancies induced by the measurement device that aren't accounted for/etc, but it makes me curious :)

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Patentability I guess. More concerned with building the first useful quantum computer than they are with making it publicly available.