{"id":223,"date":"2007-04-05T11:59:26","date_gmt":"2007-04-05T19:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=223"},"modified":"2007-04-05T11:59:26","modified_gmt":"2007-04-05T19:59:26","slug":"d-wave-still-propagating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=223","title":{"rendered":"D-Wave: Still propagating"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night Jason Pontin, the Editor-in-Chief of MIT’s Technology Review<\/em>, published a hard-hitting article<\/a> about D-Wave, the Vancouver startup that claims to have built “the world’s first commercial quantum computer.” A condensed (and, alas, considerably mangled and dumbed-down) version of his article will appear in Sunday’s New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Jason wrote to me a couple weeks ago and said that, while he knew that most journalists had gotten the D-Wave story wrong, he was determined to get it right, and wanted my help in understanding the computer-science issues. He didn’t have to ask me twice.<\/p>\n

Since I come across as pretty harsh on D-Wave in the article, I think it’s worth recalling how we got to this point. When the D-Wave story broke, my first reaction was to give them some benefit of the doubt (as you can see from the mild tone of my “Orion Anti-Hype FAQ”<\/a>). So what changed? Well, four things:<\/p>\n

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  1. I asked Geordie Rose (the founder of D-Wave and sometime commenter on this blog) twice for actual information about the speedup D-Wave claimed to be seeing over classical algorithms, and he never provided any.<\/li>\n
  2. Instead of answering my and others’ technical questions, D-Wave decided to attack academic science itself. Here’s what Herb Martin, the CEO of D-Wave, told an interviewer from ITworld<\/em><\/a>: “Businesses aren’t too fascinated about the details of quantum mechanics, but academics have their own axes to grind. I can assure you that our VCs look at us a lot closer than the government looks at the academics who win research grants.” The track record of companies that engage in this sort of behavior is not good.<\/li>\n
  3. I read article after article claiming that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. I reflected on the fact that a single one of these articles will probably reach more people than every quantum complexity paper ever written.<\/li>\n
  4. It became clear, both from published interviews and from talking to Jason, that D-Wave was doing essentially nothing to correct journalists’ misconceptions about what sorts of problems are believed to be efficiently solvable by quantum computers.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Update (4\/6):<\/strong><\/font> Geordie Rose has responded to me<\/a>. A few responses to his response:<\/p>\n