quantum

Ah, but they are using quantum computers, right.

But they don't exploit quantum coherence in the sort of way quantum computers do.

" Sometimes, it just quantum tunnels right through the wallet into my pocket!

Our current best theory that describes reality at the small scale is quantum mechanics.

So it does seem pretty likely that D-Wave's machine is doing roughly what D-Wave say it is, and that this truly is a quantum effect.

First, though, the good news: it does appear that this latest work gives some evidence that D-Wave's machine is genuinely doing something quantum.

All you have to do is to construct an intelligent non-quantum computer and ask it "Hey, are you conscious?

We do the same thing in quantum field theory, we have our quantum field and we write it as the sum of our elementary wavefunctions, which are called plane waves[2].

"Build a holodeck", "Read/write cells for under $1000", "biological satellite that... deploys/builds itself", "build quantum gears"...This seems more like 25 Startup Ideas for 2042.

One of the "axioms" of quantum field theory is that the energy of an excitation is related to the inverse square of the wavelength.

"To break the minute barrier [they] fired a control laser at an opaque crystal, sending its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states.

This problem is particularly notorious in subjects like quantum mechanics.

The reasoning sounds a bit iffy as in:“Finally, we can understand why a cup of coffee equilibrates in a room,” said Tony Short, a quantum physicist at Bristol.

The formalism of quantum field theory naturally includes plenty of situations where electrons and anti-electrons form "closed loops" in time.

In other words, in so far as D-Wave's machine is really doing that, it offers no prospect of a more-than-constant-factor speedup relative to conventional, "non-quantum" digital computers.

“Entanglement builds up between the state of the coffee cup and the state of the room.”I think you can understand coffee cooling quite well without any quantum stuff - the atoms in the coffee are moving faster than those in the room.

Yay!The bad news, part 1: This particular quantum phenomenon turns out to be one that can be efficiently and accurately simulated using ordinary classical computers.

However, it doesn't seem to be a quantum computer in the sense of something that exploits quantum effects to do computation faster than a classical device can do by more than a constant factor, and the recent hype about their machine is very misleading.

Social engineering is going to remain firmly in the "epic hack" category for the foreseeable future, even in a future age of quantum computers, synthetic consciousness, and ubiquitous use of one-time-pad encryption.

They found that the performance characteristics -- which problems are easier to solve and which harder, and by how much -- match up well between D-Wave's machine and the simulation of the quantum process it's meant to be an implementation of, whereas classical simulated annealing doesn't match at all well.