{"id":1687,"date":"2014-02-06T21:53:46","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T02:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1687"},"modified":"2016-12-10T04:25:38","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:25:38","slug":"umesh-vaziranis-response-to-geordie-rose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1687","title":{"rendered":"Umesh Vazirani responds to Geordie Rose"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might recall that Shin, Smith, Smolin, and Vazirani posted a widely-discussed preprint<\/a> a week ago, questioning the evidence for large-scale quantum behavior in the D-Wave machine. \u00a0Geordie Rose responded here.<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0Tonight, in a Shtetl-Optimized<\/em> exclusive scoop, I bring you Umesh Vazirani’s response to Geordie’s comments. Without further ado:<\/p>\n

\n

Even a cursory reading of our paper will reveal that Geordie Rose is attacking a straw man. Let me quickly outline the main point of our paper and the irrelevance of\u00a0Rose’s comments:<\/p>\n

To date the Boixo et al paper was the only serious evidence in favor of large\u00a0scale quantum behavior by the D-Wave machine. We investigated their claims\u00a0and showed that there are serious\u00a0problems with their conclusions. Their\u00a0conclusions were based on the close agreement between the input-output\u00a0data from D-Wave and quantum simulated annealing, and their inability despite\u00a0considerable effort to find any classical model that agreed with the input-output\u00a0data. In our paper, we gave a very simple\u00a0classical model of interacting magnets that closely agreed with the input-output data. We stated that our results implied\u00a0that “it is premature to conclude that D-Wave machine exhibits large scale quantum behavior”.<\/p>\n

Rose attacks our paper for claiming that “D-Wave processors are inherently classical,\u00a0and can be described by a classical model with no need to invoke quantum mechanics.” \u00a0A reading of our paper will make it perfectly clear that this is not a claim that we make.\u00a0 We state\u00a0explicitly “It is worth emphasizing that the goal of this paper is not to\u00a0provide a classical model for the D-Wave machine, … The classical model introduced here is useful for the purposes of studying the large-scale algorithmic features\u00a0of the D-Wave machine. The task of finding an accurate model for the D-Wave\u00a0machine (classical, quantum or otherwise), would be better pursued with direct access, not only to programming the D-Wave machine, but also to its actual hardware.”<\/p>\n

Rose goes on to point to a large number of experiments conducted by D-Wave to prove\u00a0small scale entanglement over 2-8 qubits and criticizes our paper for not trying to model\u00a0those aspects of D-Wave. But such small scale entanglement properties are not directly relevant\u00a0to prospects for a quantum speedup. Therefore we were specifically interested in claims\u00a0about the large scale quantum behavior of D-Wave. There was exactly one such claim,\u00a0which we duly investigated, and it did not stand up to scrutiny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might recall that Shin, Smith, Smolin, and Vazirani posted a widely-discussed preprint a week ago, questioning the evidence for large-scale quantum behavior in the D-Wave machine. \u00a0Geordie Rose responded here.\u00a0 \u00a0Tonight, in a Shtetl-Optimized exclusive scoop, I bring you Umesh Vazirani’s response to Geordie’s comments. Without further ado: Even a cursory reading of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31,4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-quantum","category-speaking-truth-to-parallelism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1687"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1691,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions\/1691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}