Talk:D-Wave Systems

message: As I put in the article, on January 19, 2007 D-Wave announced that they would be demonstrating the first commercial 16-qubit adiabatic quantum computer at two events, one at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California on February 13th, 2007 and the second at the Telus World of Science in Vancouver, Canada on February 15th, 2007.
I am hoping that once the event has happened there will be enough interest in this topic that people who know a lot more about the physics, technical details, etc. will edit and add to to this and related pages. It may also be a good idea for someone to create a page about adiabatic quantum computers.
There is a lot of information out there. Here are some external links I have found through a Google search on "adiabatic quantum" and some sites:
*rose.blog - a lot of info in the blog by Dr. Rose
*arXiv.org Search Results - academic papers related to Adiabatic Quantum Computation
* How powerful is adiabatic quantum computation?
*Adiabatic Quantum Computation is Equivalent to Standard Quantum Computation
.. and a lot more
MartinSieg 20:11, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Needs update with mention of D-Wave's upcoming 256 Qbit chip, around mid 2012 & 512 Qbit chip, around 1 Jan 2013.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/dwave-systems-announces-512-qubit.html
--59.92.162.251 (talk) 14:50, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  256 & 512 Qbit chip 

message: I don't know how to express it, but this company's technology is vaporware and pseudoscience. There are several problems with both the hardware and the computation: (1) there has been no fundamental breakthroughs in the physics required to create a quantum computer (an immediate Nobel event) and (2) it is strongly suspected that quantum computing cannot solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. I am not a physicist so I will not address (1), however, I am a computer scientists (PhD), although quantum computing is not my particular field. Quantum computing is BQP and not NP, nor is there any known algorithm for computing NP-complete problems in Polynomial time on a quantum computer. If there are no NP->P transformations then this device is at no advantage to a classical computer so saying it `solved the traveling salesman problem' is a little misleading: answers to this problem can be computed in exponential time on a classical machine. I'm not sure how to say this other than that this article (and it's mention at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer) is highly suspect. I do not believe that the pseudoscience or fraudulent claims should be allowed in reference material. Would it be possible to mark this to make the reader wary?
Response: You raise some good points. However, you admit that you are neither a physicist nor a quantum computing specialist; whereas D-Wave employs several physicists and quantum computing specialists. Thus it's quite possible that they know something that you and the rest of us do not. Further, since D-Wave is a commercial enterprise, not an academic organization, the more significant their breakthroughs, the less likely they would be to reveal the details. So, hopefully, D-Wave will eventually demonstrate a system that behaves like some kind of "quantum" computer should and also performs as well as they predict. -- Red Cedar Salmon 20:46, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Based on pseudoscience

message: An earlier version of this article read like a company press release. I've toned it down a bit, but it still makes no mention of any of the skeptical opinions which have been expressed about this demonstration (for example, see ), and the apparent lack, so far, of independent technical verification of their results. -- The Anome 10:14, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure that WP principles "fail" for this article. They are just mutually exclusive (meaning that they cannot all be satisfied at once). In this case, D-Wave is a real product using new principles and created by real engineers and scientists and has actually been purchased. Therefore, it is notable. However, since there is considerable doubt that it actually performs quantum computations [citation needed], there cannot exist a reliable source confirming what D-Wave's press releases claim. Also, at least a bit of presenting opinion as fact cannot really be avoided, for the same reason. In summary, calling a company's statements "pseudoscience" just because Quantum Computing is a new and conjectural science is not justified, and neither is this an example of a complete failure of WP's principles. While the article, on balance, should currently appear in WP, future developments (probably requiring several years' time) may either confirm inclusion or form a basis for deletion. When and as reliable published opinions contradicting D-Wave claims appear, they should be included in the article. David Spector (talk) 15:26, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV 

message: Thank you to The Anome for contributions to this page. I see that you also moved Orion quantum computing system here, which I agree makes sense, at least until there is consensus that it is a proven system of historical significance.
I guess my original version sounded like a press release because most of the information I found on the web was written by Dr. Rose. That's why we need people who know more about the related topics to revise the page.
My limited understanding of NP-complete problems and what Dr. Rose was saying about them is that they are not solvable in polynomial time by any foreseeable technology, and it is already accepted that we can accomplish a lot with ansers that are "good enough". If someone can clarify this in the article, please go ahead.
MartinSieg 15:33, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "That's why we need people who know more about the related topics to revise the page."
This includes criticism. WP is not a brochure. -Ste|vertigo 21:52, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  NP-Complete ... very hard 

message: Perhaps this article should be strictly about D-Wave, including its history, people, goals, claims, and of course how others view it (skeptics, etc.).
My intent for the article about the Orion quantum computing system, which was merged with this one, was to provide information about the technology itself. Perhaps we need an article on adiabatic quantum computing instead? I feel that the article Adiabatic process (quantum mechanics) is insufficient. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MartinSieg (talk • contribs) 04:29, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Separate info about company and tech 

message: Yes, an NP-complete problem is in NP by definition, and is therefore a yes-no question by definition and is not amenable to approximate solutions.  However, there are optimization problems that can be called FNP-complete:  They are NP-hard, and if P = NP, then they are in (the function version of) P.  What Rose means is that we should be happy with approximate solutions to FNP-complete optimization problems, even though exact solutions are out of reach, even with quantum computers.
However, there is a theorem from the 1980s that for many FNP-complete problems, in particular for the travelling salesman problem, there is a threshold beyond which approximate solutions are already FNP-complete.  This is contrary to what some of the press releases from D-Wave imply.  On the other hand, in some places Rose steps back from this implication, and says that his computer might only provide some speedup for optimization problems in FNP, maybe only a polynomial speedup rather than an exponential speedup.  If so, it would have no real bearing on NP-hardness, because all such notions allow a polynomial fudge factor.
The disclaimers from D-Wave imply that the Orion is not really a quantum computer, but a quantum special-purpose device.  If you set aside quantum mechanics for the moment, it is easy to understand that a computer is suppose to be general-purpose, or in technical terms, Turing-complete.  If it is not Turing-complete, then it is an SPD.  Likewise a quantum computer should be quantumly Turing-complete.  Since there is no such claim in the case of the "Orion" device, it is at best a quantum SPD.  You can call it clasically Turing-complete if you count the classical computer that controls it.  The technical debate at the moment is whether D-Wave's demo has any strength even as a quantum SPD, or if it is really a classical facsimile.
If some company, D-Wave or Q-Wave or someone else, built a real quantum computer, it still would not be able to try all things in parallel and solve NP-complete problems.  Quantum computing should really be thought of as "randomized computing on steroids".  Randomized computing is a kind of parallel computing, in the sense that if you flip a coin, you can imagine parallel worlds in which the answer was both heads and tails.  It is a weak kind of parallelism that has some computational value, but only a limited amount.  Quantum computing is similarly limited, even though it is exponentially faster than classical computing (even the randomized kind) for certain structured problems such as factoring.  It is NOT thought to be all that much faster for NP-complete problems.
Greg Kuperberg 21:26, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cliff Notes on Quantum Computing 

message: The article is all about the recent announcement of D-Wave's and not the company itself. Content around this was needed. Material from archived versions of company website added. Content arround Orion demos pushed down the page. 
The quote of Andrew Steane was made to the Guardian newspaper so that source should be found and cited.  Positive opinion on the announcement along with a call for peer review was made by David Deutsch, citation needed. Shadesofgrey 00:47, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I study quantum computing and you have my attention.  What do you want to know? Greg Kuperberg 04:23, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Greg, what is needed is a description of an adiabatic quantum computer. Shadesofgrey 04:52, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Needed Content and Fixes

message: Should we note that their name is most likely a pun on d-wave as in l=2\, angular momentum state, d-wave superconductivity, etc.?--Lionelbrits 16:40, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trivia 

message: For additional skepticism, see also: Shtetl-Optimized blog by Scott Aaronson
-69.87.200.74 01:43, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Speaking Truth to Parallelism 

message: http://www.news.com/D-Waves-quantum-computer-ready-for-latest-demo/2100-1010_3-6217842.html?tag=newsmap -Ravedave 22:08, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nov 2007 demo 

message: I keep an eye on slashdot and they recently posted an article referring to tomshardware that says Orion now has 28 qubits. See . The only thing I'm not sure of is if this is a reliable source.  Laptopdude  Talk  05:14, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's unlikely they have any qubits ;) Tom's hardware probably isn't an RS for this article. Verbal chat 07:25, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm much more certain about this one.   Laptopdude  Talk  21:35, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I hope you're being sarcastic, that's a press release. :) -- intgr [talk] 10:49, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orion 

message: Is this technology AQC, near adiabatic evolution (ie finite error) or something else. Published coments suggest that it is but D-Wave itself isn't being exactly clear on the matter. Here are three pro AQC citations. Perhaps, these are of use to some contributor. 
 
Kyriakos N. Sgarbas, 2007, "The Road to Quantum Artificial Intelligence" in T.S.Papatheodorou, D.N.Christodoulakis and N.N.Karanikolas (eds), "Current Trends in Informatics", Vol.A, pp.469-477, New Technologies Publications, Athens, 2007 (SET 978-960-89784-0-9)
G.P. Berman. A.R. Bishop, F. Borgonovi, V.I. Tsifrinovich, 2007 "Controllable Adiabatic Manipulation of the Qubit State" arXiv:0705.1255v1 [quant-ph] 
Shadesofgrey (talk) 01:10, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  AQC? 

message: This is very silly. Arguing about something that can be measured is a waste of time. It appears that some people are just not ready to accept a quantum break-though yet, no matter what. Skepticism is healthy, as long as it's not just an excuse to be lazy.--SkipMcCormick (talk) 01:42, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  OK, the problem is that "Quantum Computing" in the well-established field that treats of the theory of quantum algorithms refers to a theoretical device that is assumed to be capable of certain things. The pragmatic question is how close you can get to that ideal and even if you don't get particularly close, whether you can still be useful, i.e. still extract some of the speed-up you'd get from the idealized device. This is pretty finicky for all sorts of reasons I won't go into. So there is a gray area of what constitutes "pretty good: especially if we are still in the stage where proof of principle can already get you into Nature, and what is "pretty good" in those papers is not usually portable to worthwhile practical purposes. Anyway, a fair consensus is that there are various devices with a handful of qbits that are pretty good in that generous sense. After all, everybody is pioneering and the Wright brothers did not exactly build a Concorde etc... If it gets into dozens or scores of qbits (or Qbits, people get worked up over the difference but it does not really matter here), there's usually some restrictions on what algorithms the device can do, so we are getting further and further away from the idealized universal device. But if you cry foul at this point you get the reasonable reproach that you should have cried foul from the get go, since even the best 2-qbit devices are really nowhere near the idealised device. So thus far we have the idealized quantum computer, for which, in anticipation of a really good approximation being one day engineered, we have already developed all the algorithms. Then we have the various handful-of-qbits (sometimes more) experimental devices which are really not very good but nonetheless cutting-edge science. And then we have the DWave machine with 100s, 1000s, 10,000s or whatever of qbits. What gives? Well, simply that it is not even remotely an approximation of the idealized device that is the theoretical construct of the QC field. So not a quantum computer in that sense. Is it a quantum computer in any other sense? Well, yes, if only because every physical device that is used as computer is a quantum computer in the some sense! The question is, does its operation "explicitly" exploit quantum phenomena, and the answer is a cautious yes. It is certainly the tool of choice for some types of problems. But remember that there are many examples of problems are quickly "solved" approximately by suitable mechanical contraptions. So the real question is how much you can do with DWave machines, and whether it's cheaper/faster than classical alternatives. Figuring out ways to massage as many different kinds of problems into a form that the machine can work with is one sensible thing, and that task is made lighter by scaling up how many of these flux qbits they fit into the machines. So that's what they've been doing.137.205.101.77 (talk) 16:51, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Resolution? 

message: Following the addition of the recent QC vs PC comparison source, I added the following text to the article (This claim is attributed to Catherine McGeoch in the article, although not quoted):
:However, she admitted that the comparison is "not quite fair, because generic computers will always perform less well than a device dedicated to solving a specific problem"
Based on a paragraph from the article:
:The speed tests are also not quite fair, because generic computers will always perform less well than a device dedicated to solving a specific problem, says McGeoch. "A next step would be to build a conventional processor optimised for this task, for a fairer comparison," says O'Brien.
An anonymous editor changed it to:
:However, it is not unusual for general-purpose algorithms to perform less well than a device dedicated to solving a specific problem
There are multiple problems with this formulation, all of which seem to erode its value:
* The attribution of McGeoch was removed, who is the authority in this case. Positive statements are attributed to McGeoch, and so should the negative, if she said them.
* The admission that the comparison is unfair. As far as I can tell this was a comparison between regular PC CPUs against QC -- which I find unfair, because it's not the best that classical computers have to offer. Comparing QC to GPUs (vector processors) and ASICs would be fairer.
* "is not unusual" is very awkward formulation. Consider "It is not unusual for CPUs to perform less well than a GPU at rendering 3D graphics". While technically true, it suggests that sometimes CPUs may be faster -- it's misleading. The source says "will *always* perform less well"
Note that McGeoch was hired as a consultant by D-Wave, with the goal of coming up with a favorable comparison between quantum and classical computers. It's not a surprise to be that the comparison is unfair, but it's better to state explicitly in the article for balance. -- intgr [talk] 17:34, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  D-Wave Two vs PC comparison - fair or not 

message: The criticism section is pretty flawed.  It implies that after the google/NASA deal, all academic critics have stopped criticizing the company.  This is not true.  In general, the criticism section should be about the specific complaints of critics, and the response by the company  - and a new impressive deal with google+NASA doesn't count as a response.
Another point which is often raised in discussions is that "pro D-Wave" views are based on published peer-reviewed articles, and the criticism is from blog posts and private discussions.  While this is true, it risks leading to a dangerously distorted article.  The peer review of D-Wave's articles doesn't mean that they are accepted as true, or as telling the whole story, but mostly that they are interesting and likely to be true, and to contain new science.  On the other hand, criticizing D-Wave will rarely be publishable because it is hard to say "this company is full of BS" in a way that has new scientific content that a journal will want to publish.  So we should be careful not to confuse publication with credibility here.  Nevertheless, it is interesting that nevertheless people have found ways to make their D-Wave criticism into scientifically interesting articles; see e.g. arXiv:0705.1115. Aram.harrow (talk) 01:14, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: At least some of the "peer-reviewed articles" are, in fact press releases, or have no content which is falsifiable.  Still, we do have a problem with blogs and unpublished papers (arXiv are not published); namely what is the field we are looking for an "expert" in, per WP:SPS.  "Quantum computing" (we don't know who the experts are), "experimental physics" (probably, IMO, not the right field, and we don't know who the expert are), "computational complexity" (the right field for some claims, but not others), or ???.  If D-Wave employees are the only (otherwise) credible "experts", we could not use their statements, either.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 01:11, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Aram, the article you mention is from 2007 which is ages and ages before any D-Wave machines were released to the public, it has only 22 citations on Google Scholar making it one of Bravyi's least cited articles of all time, and the title is "Classical approximation schemes for the ground state
energy of quantum and classical Ising spin Hamiltonians on planar graphs" which means we do not need to read the rest of the paper to know that this "criticism of D-Wave" is not strong at all. It was known since 1965 that Jack Edmonds' "blossom algorithm" can solve planar graph Ising models in polynomial time... but D-Wave's connectivity graph is non-planar. If the problem is planar: use a classical computer to optimize it. If the problem is non-planar, annealing on D-Wave might be faster (and probably WILL be more energy efficient) than solving the problem on a classical computer. Finally, I think any "criticism" of D-Wave right now is a bad idea because humans as a species still don't have enough knowledge to determine whether or not the claims of those critics will turn out to be relevant. You raise an interesting point about blog posts vs peer-reviewed articles, but I do think peer reviewed articles are in general much more valuable than blog posts and criticisms should be publishable in the journals just like you say that pro-DWave papers can be (and still be false or irrelevant, etc.). The criticisms of Umesh Vazirani, Scott Aaronson and Matthias Troyer in the article are all terribly wrong in my opinion. Umesh: "That speed up unfortunately does not hold in the setting at hand" ... why not? I see no reason why we can't get square root speed-up for a Grover-like search. Umesh: "and therefore D-Wave's "quantum computer" even if it turns out to be a true quantum computer, and even if it can be scaled to thousands of qubits, would likely not be more powerful than a cell phone" well now it has been scaled to thousands of qubits and it beat calculations on Google supercomputers that Hartmut Neven said in his talk at the APS conference in 2016 "spent millions of dollars of computer time to do" so Umesh's criticism about the "cell phone" has already been proven to be misleading. Scott: "blowing results out of proportion on press releases that claim speedups of three orders of magnitude, in light of a paper[40] by scientists from ETH Zurich reporting a 128-qubit D-Wave computer being outperformed by a factor of 15 using regular digital computers and applying classical metaheuristics (particularly simulated annealing) to the problem that D-Wave's computer was specifically designed to solve" show me one classical computation that can find the ground state of the Ising models in Katzgraber's paper faster than D-Wave's machine did. Show me just one. Matthias: "Matthias Troyer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said that they found "no quantum speedup" across the entire range of their tests" ... funny, his 2014 Science paper shows quite clearly a figure with the label "DW2 Faster" and another label "SA faster" meaning simulated annealing is faster.... and there were points labeled in the "DW2 Faster" region that were SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE away from the cross-over line... furthermore Katzgraber's and Denchev's papers BOTH confirm that Troyer's simulated annealing is not only orders of magnitude slower than D-Wave, but also scales with a worse slope, on a log graph. Dr. Universe (talk) 00:02, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Criticism section

message: The article says nothing at all about quantum algorithms.  Yet a quantum computer can only run asymptotically faster than a classical computer by using a quantum algorithm such as Shor's factoring method, Grover's search method, etc.  D-Wave claims that their quantum computer efficiently solves an NP-hard problem, namely quadratic unconstrained binary optimization or QUBO.  However there does not currently exist any known quantum algorithm for solving NP-hard problems usefully faster than existing classical algorithms.  Furthermore if any efficient quantum algorithm existed for NP-hard problems its implications for quantum computers would be vastly more profound than Shor's algorithm.  Yet the article does not say anything about the quantum algorithm D-Wave is using.  Something is very wrong here.  Vaughan Pratt (talk) 19:02, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Why no mention of quantum algorithms?

message: The lede does not reflect the content of the article, since it summarizes the press-releases of the company and presents them as facts. The article itself is more balanced.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:59, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Six years later, it's presumably worse. 73.222.1.26 (talk) 22:14, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lede 

message: I propose that D-Wave Two be merged into this article.  What isn't a press release or a quote from a press release is not much longer than what is already here.  (I haven't researched whether "Two" was split from this article.  It doesn't really matter, as they should be together.)  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 00:52, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree. The significance or notability of the company and the systems it builds does not seem to extend to the individual models of that system. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:58, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  I agree with the merge. I have just gone through and made some clean-up edits to the D-Wave Two article. How do we go about actually merging it in? It has been flagged for a long time --Strongguy1 (talk) 21:14, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  If there is no dissent soon, I will be moving to perform this merge Strongguy1 (talk) 15:26, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm removing this as a stale merge. Widefox; talk 21:27, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge 2 

message: This list still/again consists of people already mentioned, people who don't rate as among the most notable collaborators, and people who have never worked with D-Wave.  As such I think it is best removed. Adking80 (talk) 20:38, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deleting "notable alumni and collaborators" 

message: Ladizinsky goes around calling himself a co-founder but the article doesn't reflect this. Is he more of a "founder" in name because they gave him extra stock, or what? Where does this information come from and what is his own claim based on? 12.231.67.211 (talk) 00:32, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: It is a bit confusing. The article currently states, "D-Wave was founded by Haig Farris (former chair of board), Geordie Rose (former CEO/CTO), Bob Wiens (former CFO), and Alexandre Zagoskin (former VP Research and Chief Scientist)." However, the D-Wave Systems website describes Eric Ladizinsky as "Co-Founder and Chief Scientist", and it also describes Geordie Rose as "The Founder" and Haig Farris as "co-founder". I suggest that the article be updated to read, "D-Wave Systems was founded by Geordie Rose (former CEO/CTO), along with Haig Farris (former chair of board), Eric Ladizinsky (current Chief Scientist), Bob Wiens (former CFO) and Alexandre Zagoskin (former VP Research and Chief Scientist)." nagualdesign 01:23, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Co-founders?