Accompanied by a flourish of hype, Canadian company D-Wave Systems showed off "the world's first commercially viable quantum computer" at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley yesterday. Some scientists have questioned whether the approach D-Wave's demonstrated would scale up to the processing power necessary to surpass classical computers. From Scientific American:
D-Wave announced that it has constructed a 16-bit version crafted from the superconducting element niobium. "What we've built is really a systems-level proof of concept," says Geordie Rose, D-Waves co-founder and chief technology officer. "We want to get people's imagination stimulated."
For the demonstration, he says D-Wave operators remotely controlled the quantum computer, housed in Burnaby, British Columbia, from a laptop in California. The quantum computer was given three problems to solve: searching for molecular structures that match a target molecule, creating a complicated seating plan, and filling in Sudoku puzzles.
Rose says D-Wave plans to submit its results for peer review at a major journal. He notes that experts will be given a chance to inspect the system, and that the company plans to make its prototype available online free of charge to stir interest. Users would enter a problem to be solved, and the device would send the solution from Canada.
And how exactly would users know that it was the quantum computer rather than a human or ordinary computer answering their queries? "There's really no way to convince a skeptic who's accessing the machine remotely," Rose admits. For now, D-Wave's device is slower than an inexpensive home computer, but Rose says a potentially faster 1,000-qubit version should be available by the end of next year.
