oh one more thing a true Qantum computer with 300 Qantum bits would be the size of a grain of sand

The D-Wave 2 with 512 qubits has the size of a small room.
Tullio

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a true Qantum computer with 300 Qantum bits would be the size of a grain of sand

Let's concentrate on exactly why a quantum computer offers an advantage and exactly how it works. Yesterday I got a free Micro S-chip that is one third the size of a postage stamp; it has 2 gigabytes of storage. That is exactly: 16,000,000,000 bits of information. It has a plug-in connector. It came with a $12.00 calculator.

So how do you get information in and out of a quantum computer that is the size of a grain of sand. Also, any 8 bit (Binary) byte has 256 states. Any transistor works by tunneling either of electrons or "Holes"

To sum up all of the g-whiz statements made as homage to quantum computers: they are exactly those traits that exist in todays computers or could be implemented today in standard digital logic.

So how do they work? What is the advantage, and can they be general or specific application processors. We are now approaching 100,000,000,000,000 floating point calculations per second with today's advanced computers.

I don't think that D-Wave 1 or 2 are digital computers. They are analog computers working on optimization problems like the traveling salesman path which is not solvable by any digital computer in any finite time. If they can demonstrate this ability they would be very useful, for instance in pattern recognition problems.
Tullio

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I don't think that D-Wave 1 or 2 are digital computers. They are analog computers working on optimization problems like the traveling salesman path...

I find it very curious and suspicious that there are no big news/science splashes for the device beyond extreme Marketing hype. If they were working as Marketed, you could bet that either the NSA would buy them out and we would hear nothing at all. Or the remarkable results would be hot news all around the world.

Instead, we have the two devices: One to the military and one to NASA.

All I've seen for them is a science paper suggesting the use of quantum effects between four qubits over surprisingly long periods of microseconds.

The equipment is spectacular, and it is an interesting alternate idea for going quantum, but does it work?


Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

This is a quotation from an article in Physics World, a magazine from the American Institute of Physics:

D-Wave says that Google, NASA
and the USRA subjected its 512-qubit
system to a series of benchmark and
acceptance tests before installation. “In
all cases, the D-Wave Two system met
or exceeded the required performance
specifications, in some cases by a large
margin,” claims the company.

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