14 ms·

Lockheed Martin pays $10M for D-Wave's Quantum Computer

69 points by ricksta 13y ago

LAMike 13y ago
"500,000 times faster than its predecessor" How much power do quantum computers use and when will they be affordable enough to put in a smartphone/tablet? And why isn't any other company doing this?
- jd007 13y ago
  Quantum computers are still in its infancy, and a lot more work is needed before we can even begin talking about practical, effective use. Consumer market readiness is even further away. It's probably not worthwhile for quantum computing chips to enter the consumer market, because (AFAIK) quantum computers are only very good at solving a very specific set of problems (e.g. integer factorization), but their advantages over classical chips diminish (or even become negative) for general purpose computation. Of course as quantum chips develop, quantum algorithms will develop/evolve with them so that might change. There have been some skepticism over whether their quantum computing chip (and similar ones that other companies develop) is actually a quantum computer (e.g. whether true quantum entanglement was observed). There are other companies doing this, such as IBM.
  - LAMike 13y ago
    Could a quantum computer mine bitcoins?
- cdibona 13y ago
  Affordability will come, the really difficult problem with the techology from a portable perspective is you need an exceptionally low temperature and very low vibration environment otherwise you'll never anneal. Yer qubits get too warm and shakey in your pocket...
  - dchichkov 13y ago
    There is no need to keep them there. You can just ssh to some qbits from your pocket.
Volpe 13y ago
So does this mean Shor's Algorithm is going to kick in for real and ruin all our securityz?
- jd007 13y ago
  Probably not anytime soon. Right now a 4 year old kid can beat the best implemented Shor's algo (http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v6/n11/full/nphoton.2012.259.html http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v6/n11/full/nphoton.20...).
- adrianhoward 13y ago
  So does this mean Shor's Algorithm is going to kick in for real and ruin all our securityz? Nope. First, as I understand it, the D-Wave stuff isn't a system that can run Shor's. Second, Shor's only ruins security for a certain class of crypto algorithm. There are already algorithms that exist today that a proof against it (e.g the McEliece cryptosystem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem). Third, if you're really worried about the man cracking your s3cr3t stuff with quantum computers go pick the right cryptosystem ;-) Plenty of symmetric encryption systems that only get their key lengths reduced (effectively halved) by Grover's algorithm.
  - daeken 13y ago
    People tend to equate asymmetric crypto with the likes of RSA; systems where the efficient factoring of large numbers is a death sentence. But there's a whole slew of other asymmetric cryptosystems without such properties, e.g. elliptic-curve cryptography.
    - forTheRecord 13y ago
      Shors algorithm also breaks elliptic-curve cryptography.
      - daeken 13y ago
        Oh, wow, I've never seen the variant that breaks ECC; that's really quite awesome. Time to read some papers!
Xcelerate 13y ago
D-Wave's advancements are very interesting to me for a few reasons. The first is that initially many people suspected D-Wave was a scam, because the most successful research efforts in quantum computing used just a few qubits, and D-Wave claimed a massive improvement (something like 128 or 256). Scott Aaronson (http://www.scottaaronson.com http://www.scottaaronson.com) was perhaps the most vocal critic. Over the years, the criticism has softened, and D-Wave has managed to get a paper or two into Nature. I think the truth of what they've achieved is somewhat less than what their marketing machine would like to suggest, but it's nevertheless very impressive (and D-Wave is certainly a place I'd like to work at if I could). To clarify, D-Wave has not developed a general-purpose quantum computer, and in fact the term "general purpose" is kind of ill-defined for quantum computing anyway. Right now, there are a lot of different quantum effects that are used in different ways to accomplish specific tasks. I believe D-Wave's device uses quantum annealing to solve certain optimization problems, but someone check me if I'm wrong. The little I do know about quantum computing relates to my area of study: simulation. The computation required to exactly solve the Schrodinger equation scales with 2^N for the number of particles (or whatever basis the equation is set in). Even the largest supercomputers are incapable of doing more than a few atoms [which, incidentally, is actually what I'm attempting to accomplish right now for a project that I should be working on instead of posting on here...] Anyway, with quantum computers, the scale would be O(N) instead of O(2^N), so you could perform incredibly accurate simulations that reach chemical accuracy. Chemical accuracy is kind of the holy grail of simulation, because what it means is that you can predict actual, macroscopic chemical properties of a variety of substances without doing any real-world experiments whatsoever. I believe it has been accomplished for things like pure hydrogen and quite a few bosonic systems (bosons are easier to simulate since they don't suffer from the fermion sign problem - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_sign_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_sign_problem). Anyway, I probably sound like I know more than I really do, but hopefully this gives you an idea of what kind of applications a real, working quantum computer could be used to achieve.
- papaf 13y ago
  Out of interest, when the chemically accurate simulations are made are there any surprises? Or do the estimations that are normally used good enough for most purposes?
anarchotroll 13y ago
Lockheed had been working with D-Wave for a while. If they decided to actually buy one of their computers, this probably means that they liked what they were seeing.
- dsl 13y ago
  This is the second one LMT has purchased. Which means they liked it enough to buy the upgraded model.
nannasin28 13y ago
I believe D-Wave's device uses quantum annealing to solve certain optimization problems, but someone check me if I'm wrong. http://www.hqew.net http://www.hqew.net
mtgx 13y ago
I wonder if Google will buy this version, too. I think they've been working with D-wave for a few years now. http://phys.org/news180107947.html http://phys.org/news180107947.html
- asafira 13y ago
  I can almost guarantee they will buy this version.
adrianhoward 13y ago
"Quantum computers operate at speeds unattainable by even today’s most powerful supercomputers, operations that are so fast, they can process millions of calculations in a fraction of the months, even years, traditional computers take" God damn I hate bullshit lines like this used about QCs. The whole article is gives the usual misleading impression of QCs being generically faster than normal computers. They're not. They can answer some problems much, much faster than traditional non-QC computers because they are capable of running classes of algorithm that rely on quantum effects. Don't get me wrong - that's a pretty darn useful subset of problems... the future of QCs is full of rosy cool stuff... but this isn't just like upping the clock cycles of a CPU. It doesn't make everything faster. Completely different classes of constraint are being tweaked. QCs aren't going to make everybody's laptop or smartphone rilly rilly fast.
- dboat 13y ago
  Any chance they could render textures, geometry, bullets and blood spray really fast?
- ok_craig 13y ago
  Are there any sources you know of that discuss what kinds of problems can be solved faster with quantum computing? I'm curious about them.
  - daeken 13y ago
    Wikipedia has a fairly decent list of quantum algorithms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm Shor's algorithm being one of the standard examples of where quantum computing completely crushes classical computing.
    - adrianhoward 13y ago
      In addition to the Wikipedia site http://www.scottaaronson.com/ http://www.scottaaronson.com/ has a bunch of useful stuff on his blog.
  - 13y ago
anigbrowl 13y ago
$10 million is cheap. True, it only does discrete optimization problems, but I think you could make your money back in a few years years renting it out at $5k/hour and consulting on translating problems to that domain. Will some clients be wildly overpaying for something they could do equally well on regular computers? Sure, and they'll love every $ of it because of the bragging rights. Is this an efficient use of the hardware? Certainly not, it'll probably be exploiting <1% of the system's potential. Doesn't matter. People will frequently pay more for novelty than actual utility. If their vanity subsidizes the tiny subset of research computation that would have serious economic benefits, I call that a win-win.
waterlesscloud 13y ago
So it's worth like 1/10th a Google employee.
ibrahima 13y ago
This part of the article makes me facepalm so hard, as someone who knows a little about quantum computing and a lot more about computer vision: > Quantum computers operate at speeds unattainable by even today’s most powerful supercomputers, operations that are so fast, they can process millions of calculations in a fraction of the months, even years, traditional computers take. Quantum computers can carry out some algorithms which normal computers can't, which can be much faster, but they're not usable for general computing so this statement makes no sense. > They can even be taught and can recognize objects in images, a task standard computers struggle with. Er... what? I wouldn't say that standard computers can do vision easily, but it's a problem of finding the right algorithms, not computing power.
CurtMonash 13y ago
I stopped reading when the article suggested that millions of calculations, when done on other computers, take months.
- sigkill 13y ago
  If you define one calculation as one instruction that is carried in a single clock cycle, even the stupidly cheap Atmel chips (which power the Arduino) runs at 16MHz, which is 16 million instructions per second.
arianvanp 13y ago
So I am in my final year of high school now, and I'm not studying physics next year. The only thing about 'quantum physics' that we had was emission-spectra, and light-interference. Quantum Physics sounds _Really_ interesting though, so I would love if anyone could point me in the right direction with where and how I start learning this stuff. Thanks:D
- asparagui 13y ago
  a) Learn this pair of amazon keywords: "dover physics" and "dover math". b) Buy this book to get going: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Simple-Matrix-Physics/dp/0486445305/ http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Simple-Matrix-Physic... c) Then buy this one to scare professors: http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Classical-Quantum-Physics-Dover/dp/048667164X/ http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Classical-Quantum-Physics-...
  - arianvanp 13y ago
    thanks! The books aren't even that expensive. Will definitely check them out!
- asafira 13y ago
  This is great to see! Of course, this stuff isn't easy to jump into, but I recommend checking out some of the free online courses for something good. Coursera once had a quantum computer course (!) taught by a pretty famous guy in the field! It didn't have quantum mechanics as a prerequisite, either!
  - arianvanp 13y ago
    I will definitely check out the Coursera courses. thanks!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
harichinnan 13y ago
Did anyone try their developer portal. I'm all excited to hear that they'll put up their quantum computer online after Beta. http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dev-portal.html http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dev-portal.html

69 points by ricksta 13y ago

"500,000 times faster than its predecessor" How much power do quantum computers use and when will they be affordable enough to put in a smartphone/tablet? And why isn't any other company doing this?

jd007 13y ago
Quantum computers are still in its infancy, and a lot more work is needed before we can even begin talking about practical, effective use. Consumer market readiness is even further away. It's probably not worthwhile for quantum computing chips to enter the consumer market, because (AFAIK) quantum computers are only very good at solving a very specific set of problems (e.g. integer factorization), but their advantages over classical chips diminish (or even become negative) for general purpose computation. Of course as quantum chips develop, quantum algorithms will develop/evolve with them so that might change. There have been some skepticism over whether their quantum computing chip (and similar ones that other companies develop) is actually a quantum computer (e.g. whether true quantum entanglement was observed). There are other companies doing this, such as IBM.
- LAMike 13y ago
  Could a quantum computer mine bitcoins?
cdibona 13y ago
Affordability will come, the really difficult problem with the techology from a portable perspective is you need an exceptionally low temperature and very low vibration environment otherwise you'll never anneal. Yer qubits get too warm and shakey in your pocket...
- dchichkov 13y ago
  There is no need to keep them there. You can just ssh to some qbits from your pocket.

Volpe 13y ago

So does this mean Shor's Algorithm is going to kick in for real and ruin all our securityz?

jd007 13y ago
Probably not anytime soon. Right now a 4 year old kid can beat the best implemented Shor's algo (http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v6/n11/full/nphoton.2012.259.html http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v6/n11/full/nphoton.20...).
adrianhoward 13y ago
So does this mean Shor's Algorithm is going to kick in for real and ruin all our securityz? Nope. First, as I understand it, the D-Wave stuff isn't a system that can run Shor's. Second, Shor's only ruins security for a certain class of crypto algorithm. There are already algorithms that exist today that a proof against it (e.g the McEliece cryptosystem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem). Third, if you're really worried about the man cracking your s3cr3t stuff with quantum computers go pick the right cryptosystem ;-) Plenty of symmetric encryption systems that only get their key lengths reduced (effectively halved) by Grover's algorithm.
- daeken 13y ago
  People tend to equate asymmetric crypto with the likes of RSA; systems where the efficient factoring of large numbers is a death sentence. But there's a whole slew of other asymmetric cryptosystems without such properties, e.g. elliptic-curve cryptography.
  - forTheRecord 13y ago
    Shors algorithm also breaks elliptic-curve cryptography.
    - daeken 13y ago
      Oh, wow, I've never seen the variant that breaks ECC; that's really quite awesome. Time to read some papers!

Xcelerate 13y ago

D-Wave's advancements are very interesting to me for a few reasons. The first is that initially many people suspected D-Wave was a scam, because the most successful research efforts in quantum computing used just a few qubits, and D-Wave claimed a massive improvement (something like 128 or 256). Scott Aaronson (http://www.scottaaronson.com http://www.scottaaronson.com) was perhaps the most vocal critic. Over the years, the criticism has softened, and D-Wave has managed to get a paper or two into Nature. I think the truth of what they've achieved is somewhat less than what their marketing machine would like to suggest, but it's nevertheless very impressive (and D-Wave is certainly a place I'd like to work at if I could). To clarify, D-Wave has not developed a general-purpose quantum computer, and in fact the term "general purpose" is kind of ill-defined for quantum computing anyway. Right now, there are a lot of different quantum effects that are used in different ways to accomplish specific tasks. I believe D-Wave's device uses quantum annealing to solve certain optimization problems, but someone check me if I'm wrong. The little I do know about quantum computing relates to my area of study: simulation. The computation required to exactly solve the Schrodinger equation scales with 2^N for the number of particles (or whatever basis the equation is set in). Even the largest supercomputers are incapable of doing more than a few atoms [which, incidentally, is actually what I'm attempting to accomplish right now for a project that I should be working on instead of posting on here...] Anyway, with quantum computers, the scale would be O(N) instead of O(2^N), so you could perform incredibly accurate simulations that reach chemical accuracy. Chemical accuracy is kind of the holy grail of simulation, because what it means is that you can predict actual, macroscopic chemical properties of a variety of substances without doing any real-world experiments whatsoever. I believe it has been accomplished for things like pure hydrogen and quite a few bosonic systems (bosons are easier to simulate since they don't suffer from the fermion sign problem - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_sign_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_sign_problem). Anyway, I probably sound like I know more than I really do, but hopefully this gives you an idea of what kind of applications a real, working quantum computer could be used to achieve.

papaf 13y ago
Out of interest, when the chemically accurate simulations are made are there any surprises? Or do the estimations that are normally used good enough for most purposes?

anarchotroll 13y ago

Lockheed had been working with D-Wave for a while. If they decided to actually buy one of their computers, this probably means that they liked what they were seeing.

dsl 13y ago
This is the second one LMT has purchased. Which means they liked it enough to buy the upgraded model.

nannasin28 13y ago

I believe D-Wave's device uses quantum annealing to solve certain optimization problems, but someone check me if I'm wrong. http://www.hqew.net http://www.hqew.net

mtgx 13y ago

I wonder if Google will buy this version, too. I think they've been working with D-wave for a few years now. http://phys.org/news180107947.html http://phys.org/news180107947.html

asafira 13y ago
I can almost guarantee they will buy this version.

adrianhoward 13y ago

"Quantum computers operate at speeds unattainable by even today’s most powerful supercomputers, operations that are so fast, they can process millions of calculations in a fraction of the months, even years, traditional computers take" God damn I hate bullshit lines like this used about QCs. The whole article is gives the usual misleading impression of QCs being generically faster than normal computers. They're not. They can answer some problems much, much faster than traditional non-QC computers because they are capable of running classes of algorithm that rely on quantum effects. Don't get me wrong - that's a pretty darn useful subset of problems... the future of QCs is full of rosy cool stuff... but this isn't just like upping the clock cycles of a CPU. It doesn't make everything faster. Completely different classes of constraint are being tweaked. QCs aren't going to make everybody's laptop or smartphone rilly rilly fast.

dboat 13y ago
Any chance they could render textures, geometry, bullets and blood spray really fast?
ok_craig 13y ago
Are there any sources you know of that discuss what kinds of problems can be solved faster with quantum computing? I'm curious about them.
- daeken 13y ago
  Wikipedia has a fairly decent list of quantum algorithms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm Shor's algorithm being one of the standard examples of where quantum computing completely crushes classical computing.
  - adrianhoward 13y ago
    In addition to the Wikipedia site http://www.scottaaronson.com/ http://www.scottaaronson.com/ has a bunch of useful stuff on his blog.
- 13y ago

anigbrowl 13y ago

$10 million is cheap. True, it only does discrete optimization problems, but I think you could make your money back in a few years years renting it out at $5k/hour and consulting on translating problems to that domain. Will some clients be wildly overpaying for something they could do equally well on regular computers? Sure, and they'll love every $ of it because of the bragging rights. Is this an efficient use of the hardware? Certainly not, it'll probably be exploiting <1% of the system's potential. Doesn't matter. People will frequently pay more for novelty than actual utility. If their vanity subsidizes the tiny subset of research computation that would have serious economic benefits, I call that a win-win.

waterlesscloud 13y ago

So it's worth like 1/10th a Google employee.

ibrahima 13y ago

This part of the article makes me facepalm so hard, as someone who knows a little about quantum computing and a lot more about computer vision: > Quantum computers operate at speeds unattainable by even today’s most powerful supercomputers, operations that are so fast, they can process millions of calculations in a fraction of the months, even years, traditional computers take. Quantum computers can carry out some algorithms which normal computers can't, which can be much faster, but they're not usable for general computing so this statement makes no sense. > They can even be taught and can recognize objects in images, a task standard computers struggle with. Er... what? I wouldn't say that standard computers can do vision easily, but it's a problem of finding the right algorithms, not computing power.

CurtMonash 13y ago

I stopped reading when the article suggested that millions of calculations, when done on other computers, take months.

sigkill 13y ago
If you define one calculation as one instruction that is carried in a single clock cycle, even the stupidly cheap Atmel chips (which power the Arduino) runs at 16MHz, which is 16 million instructions per second.

arianvanp 13y ago

So I am in my final year of high school now, and I'm not studying physics next year. The only thing about 'quantum physics' that we had was emission-spectra, and light-interference. Quantum Physics sounds _Really_ interesting though, so I would love if anyone could point me in the right direction with where and how I start learning this stuff. Thanks:D

asparagui 13y ago
a) Learn this pair of amazon keywords: "dover physics" and "dover math". b) Buy this book to get going: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Simple-Matrix-Physics/dp/0486445305/ http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Simple-Matrix-Physic... c) Then buy this one to scare professors: http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Classical-Quantum-Physics-Dover/dp/048667164X/ http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Classical-Quantum-Physics-...
- arianvanp 13y ago
  thanks! The books aren't even that expensive. Will definitely check them out!
asafira 13y ago
This is great to see! Of course, this stuff isn't easy to jump into, but I recommend checking out some of the free online courses for something good. Coursera once had a quantum computer course (!) taught by a pretty famous guy in the field! It didn't have quantum mechanics as a prerequisite, either!
- arianvanp 13y ago
  I will definitely check out the Coursera courses. thanks!

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

harichinnan 13y ago

Did anyone try their developer portal. I'm all excited to hear that they'll put up their quantum computer online after Beta. http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dev-portal.html http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dev-portal.html