and at least over here
Not a blogger is stirring
The reason is clear
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Comment #1 November 15th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
At least you get an extra three hours living on the east coast.
(That’s a joke peoples. And not a particularly funny one, yes I admit.)
Comment #2 November 15th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
On the other hand, what I loved about living on the west coast was that I got to read The Onion three hours early.
(Alright, back to work…)
Comment #3 November 15th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
[Morbo]
TIME ZONES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY
[/Morbo]
Comment #4 November 15th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
An nobody’s attending your talk today 🙂
Comment #5 November 17th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Hi Scott,
I would like to hear your comment about the last announce by Geordie Rose?
He seems to have built a 28-qbit QC..
Comment #6 November 18th, 2007 at 1:38 am
Matteo, what I have to say about D-Wave I’ve already said at length. Until they actually provide actual evidence for an actual speedup over classical computers, I hope to spend my time otherwise than remonstrating with them for details and responding to their latest irrelevant press release.
Comment #7 November 18th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Scott,
we will see at the end of 2008, when the roadmap shows a functional 1024 qbit system.
By the way, it seems that not only Geordie Rose is believing in his approach to QC..
From the news..
D-Wave taps Google image search for quantum computer
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202805164
Comment #8 November 18th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I share Scott’s critical opinion, but if there is really nothing behind the hype, then D-Wave is just a big scam, and I’m not inclined to believe that their investors are so gullible. Anyway, if somebody attended their presentation at SC07, I would be grateful for your informed opinion…
Comment #9 November 19th, 2007 at 3:30 am
Done.
Comment #10 November 19th, 2007 at 3:48 am
Stes,
can read something more here:
http://nextquant.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/d-wave-28-qubit-quantum-computer-matches-images/
Comment #11 November 19th, 2007 at 10:51 am
I’ve found a single report from the SC07 conference. Unfortunately, without any detail…
Comment #12 November 19th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Scott,
Uh-oh, it looks like your super-secret NSA deal to subvert foreign QC research has been leaked !
From the D-Wave blog:
10. Borgo – November 10, 2007
This Aaronson guy is a total jackass. On top of which he doesn’t seem to be a real scientist either, take a look at his CV he has maybe 5 total publications in real journals and ZERO physics papers… my theory is that he is being paid by the nsa to discredit foreign qc efforts… and that’s how he got in at mit…sure as hell not based on competence or ethics
Comment #13 November 19th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
When, back in 2000, I initiated a discussion on A. Plotnikov’s P=NP claim, I was also accused of connection with NSA, and that my name is not real 🙂
http://web.archive.org/web/20030808174742/www.circling.org/features/media_6.html
Comment #14 November 19th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Kevin: Yeah, I saw that. I was hoping the leak wouldn’t spread…
Comment #15 November 19th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Professor Corey’s analysis of P=NP are noteworthy.
Comment #16 November 19th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
do they accept people on ethics? cause ill rework my resume if they do. okay, cheap shot.
Comment #17 November 20th, 2007 at 4:31 am
Do I understand right that D-wave will have the following business model: customers give them problems to solve, and they return an approximate solution claiming that it was obtained by their quantum stuff?
Comment #18 November 20th, 2007 at 6:36 am
Report from SC: the dwave showing was the same as all their previous public appearances – demonstrate how some NP-hard problem has applicability to an interesting “real world” problem (in this case, image feature matching, using maximum common subgraph), and “solve” the problem using their latest device.
Of course, as usual, there were no details on the performance of the chip – most importantly coherence times of the qubits. However, some of the dwave staff revealed the following during the show:
1.) It would appear that even dwave doesn’t have any idea if their qubits are coherent or not for the length of the computations. It’s not that they won’t release their data on it, it’s that they themselves don’t seem to know for sure. (This is just the impression I got; they didn’t explicitly say this.)
2.) The technique they use to “solve” NP-hard optimization problems basically follows the Farhi quantum adiabatic computing approach, except they do not obey the adiabatic limit. That is to say, they change the system Hamiltonian faster than the adiabatic limit allows, and hence they do not end up in the ground state of the final Hamiltonian.
What is interesting is that dwave are guessing that this approach will still yield results that are useful. They have no actual theoretical models that predict that the outcomes of such experiments will be useful (i.e. that the final state will represent an answer to the optimization problem that is not the global optimum, but is very close to the global optimum). Dwave are hoping that this approach will work, and instead of trying to build models to see if it does work, they have instead convinced investors to let them build a machine that they claim implements this so-called “quantum annealing” and see if their algorithm technique works in practice.
Therefore Dwave’s success relies on two unknowns: a.) does quantum annealing actually give results that are sufficiently near the global optimum for optimization problems such that the results are practically useful? b.) can Dwave actually build a machine that implements quantum annealing, or are their superconducting qubits only coherent and well-controlled for a short portion of the computation?
3.) The third interesting comment from Dwave was that they don’t seem to be too scared about the possibility that what they end up building isn’t even a quantum annealer (let alone a quantum computer, which from the above, we know is not something they’re even trying to build), but is actually a classical annealing machine. They claim that because of the low temperature and the high frequencies they can run the machine at, as a classical annealer their machine will still beat the best classical computing algorithms. I am skeptical of this: if a classical annealing machine easily outpaces the best classical optimization problems, then why hasn’t anyone built one yet? (I think Dwave’s answer to that would be that superconducting JJ technology has only relatively recently become available in such a way that you can easily fabricate many JJ’s on a chip, but I’m not convinced by that argument.)
Best,
Joe.
Comment #19 November 20th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
At the risk of asking for sincere advice, what are the social norms on STOC submissions? Do folks wait to receive a review, before (e.g.) posting them to the arxiv server? Also, why am I asking?
Well, our UW Quantum System Engineering (QSE) group sent in a submission … we had some results on the overlap between geometry, cryptography, and simulation … we saw these results would have fit nicely into the 2007 STOC’s first-day sessions on geometry and cryptography.
Plus, Victoria BC is such a beautiful place to visit!
Comment #20 November 20th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Well, since this whole thread is off topic anyway… It seems people just love stealing your “intellectual” property, Scott. 😉
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780622/
Comment #21 November 21st, 2007 at 7:47 am
Sorry to bring up D-wave again, but the news and blogs, are saying that not only have they managed to make a 28 qubit QC, but they can also perform successful facial recognition with it. After solving the biggest problem in computational complexity in February and now one of the biggest problems in pattern recognition, are they going to announce the successful completion of a positronic brain next?
No seriously, are D-wave:
1- A true group of geniuses, leagues ahead of all other computer science and physics researchers, and we should all pay attention?
2- A group of highly self delusional computer scientists and physicists passionate enough to convince the more adventurous or gullible investors?
3- A highly elaborate technological scam, whose perpetrators already have their escape to Mexico planned for sometime next year?
I really don’t get it…
Comment #22 November 21st, 2007 at 7:54 am
In continuation of my previous comment, check:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202805164
The funnest part was this passage:
“We have been collaborating with Hartmut Neven, founder of the image-recognition company, Neven Vision, just after Google acquired it last year,” said Rose. “Neven’s original algorithms had to make many compromises on how it did things–since ordinary computers can’t do things the way the brain does. But we believe that our quantum computer algorithms are not all that different from the way the brain solves image-matching problems, so we were able to simplify Neven’s algorithms and get superior results.”
I wonder what Penrose thinks…
Comment #23 November 21st, 2007 at 8:55 am
@Alex
We don’t even know yet how the SudoQ game worked (16 bit register vs. 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible solutions). Has anybody attended D-Wave’s SC07 presentation to tell more about the image recognition application?..
@Daniel “D-Wave’s business model”
There might be also
a Plan B: ‘green’ superconducting computing
and
a Plan C: leverage the patent portfolio
Comment #24 November 21st, 2007 at 9:07 am
Alex, my guess is that’s a mix of option 2 and 3. More specifically, 2 for their technical staff and 3 for their marketing BS’ers. But I would be happy to be wrong – being open-minded (but not gullible) never hurts :).
Comment #25 November 21st, 2007 at 9:16 am
… on SudoQ …
Accroding to this post, it wasn’t a 16 bit output register but a six bit output register…
Comment #26 November 21st, 2007 at 11:32 am
what are the social norms on STOC submissions? Do folks wait to receive a review, before (e.g.) posting them to the arxiv server?
Some people do, but I’ve never seen anything wrong with posting a preprint as soon as you and your coauthors think the paper is ready.
Comment #27 November 21st, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Scott,
Off-topic, but did you attend the D-Wave talk at MIT yesterday? If so, I’d be curious about your thoughts.
Thanks
Comment #28 November 25th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
@nextquant:
It was 16 bits of output. I said that many problems only have 6 total *useful* bits of output after the 16 bits have been read and processed (i.e. the 6 bits that represent the Max. Independent Set of a 6-node graph, as Geordie said on his blog in March).