D-Wave’s quantum optimizer pitted against traditional computers

One of D-Wave's chips.

D-Wave

Back in 2007, a company called D-Wave made waves by claiming it had built a 16-bit quantum computer at a time when most academic labs could only manage a handful of bits. What they demonstrated, however, wasn't a quantum computer in the sense that most people use the term. The company has since started calling its device a "quantum optimizer." Although it's not a general-purpose quantum computer, the hardware does seem to be capable of tackling some computationally hard challenges.

The actual performance of the hardware and the software that controls it (called, somewhat ironically, the Black Box) hasn't really been described in detail. That situation seems to be changing this week, as a pair of academic researchers will be presenting a set of problems tackled both by D-Wave's hardware and by software running on more traditional computers. The results generally show D-Wave's equipment performing well, but it doesn't always beat the more mundane computers.

In a quantum computer, a set of qubits are both entangled and placed in a superposition state where they have a mixture of the two possible values (zero and one). The system is manipulated to perform a calculation, and then the actual values held by the qubits are read in order to provide the solution.