What's the deal with this Dwave device??
Is it the real thing?
According to wikipedia there is a "history of controversy." [1] Can anyone here provide more details?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#History_of_contr...
According to wikipedia there is a "history of controversy." [1] Can anyone here provide more details?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#History_of_contr...
It looks like it's the real thing in terms of being able to do a lot of useful quantum calculations that can't be done as easily with classical computers. It's not the full deal in terms of being able to do everything a 'true' quantum computer should be able to do - sounds like it might be able to help the NSA out with their data problem though.
Some people believe the Dwave device shouldn't be labeled as a "Quantum Computer" because the general community typically uses the Quantum Computer label for a device which could compute NP-Complete problems in linear time instead of exponential time, the Dwave device cannot do this.
If you are interested in what exactly the D-Wave computer is doing, http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400 is a good source.
There is a genneral algorithm that could solve many (all?) NP-Complete problems in the square root of the time it takes classical algorithms, but that is still exponential.