When Vancouver’s D-Wave Systems Inc. provided Google with a processor designed to perform quantum computing for object recognition, there was no question it did some amazing things.
But was it computing based on quantum mechanics? Quantum computing, after all, has been something of a scientific holy grail, and D-Waves’ claims have met with considerable skepticism.
Experiments conducted by D-Wave scientists and published May 11 in the prestigious British science journal Nature should lay that question to rest, said D-Wave founder chief technical officer Geordie Rose.
“Part of the reason we did this work and published it was to answer this question once and for all,” Rose said. “The fact that it functions is not in question. What was highly debated was the method it used to solve those problems.
“The intent of the article targeted this issue of whether the chips that we build are in fact quantum computers. The experiment was designed to give a smoking-gun answer to that question, and the answer is absolutely, yes, they are quantum computers.”
But William Oliver, a physicist with MIT who wrote an analysis of the D-Wave experiment in Nature, said Rose might be overstating things a bit, although he credits the company with having taken a major step forward.
He disagreed that the experiment demonstrates that the D-Wave processors are quantum computers. Oliver said more experiments are needed to verify that claim.
“This is a very huge step for them,” he told Business in Vancouver. “This got them in the game. They have demonstrated that whatever they’re building this thing out of can behave quantum mechanically.”
But Oliver pointed out that others have done the same. The next big task will be for D-Wave to prove it can solve large-scale problems using quantum computing.
Whether a computer follows classical physics (using a binary system) or quantum physics (using qubits) is an important distinction, because the first scientist who is able to develop a functional quantum computer can expect some very big players – Google, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon – knocking on his or her door, said Daniel Burrus, an American technology forecaster and author of the book Flash Foresight.
“D-Wave has been very aggressive in what they’ve been claiming – unsubstantiated so far,” Burrus said. “If, somehow, they’ve got a way to substantiate their claims they could be a forerunner.”
Computers calculations use 0 and 1 (bits) to do calculations, which is equivalent to “on” or “off.”
Quantum computing processes information based on “qubits”: 0, 1 and 0 and 1 simultaneously. The 0 and 1 is known as “superposition.”
“This is like giving us another dimension,” Burrus said.
Added Rose: “You can make them [quantum computers] do things that you could simply cannot ask a conventional bit to do.”
If D-Wave’s computers can do what the company claims they can, it will mean a significant advance in computing science.
“Things we could hardly imagine are going to be possible – vast amounts of computation in a very short time,” said Richard Rosenberg, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia’s computer science department. “And that’s going to have an impact, which I don’t think anyone can predict. Science fiction will be realized, in many aspects.”
Quantum computing allows for extremely complex computations involving massive amounts of data.
There is more than one way to approach quantum computing. D-Wave’s processors use niobium chips cooled to within a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (273.15 C).
Rose said more experiments are forthcoming that will prove D-Wave’s quantum computing abilities.
“We’ve got a lot of exciting science that’s going to be coming down the pike soon. We have a plan in place to follow this with several publications that go into some detail on not just the presence of quantum mechanics but its role in solving really hard problems.”
D-Wave is ready to start selling its processors and has a sales team in the field.
“We’re full on in commercialization mode right now,” Rose said.