FWIIW d-wave is almost certainly a fraud, or are fooling themselves. Scott Aaronson (an honest researcher in the quantum computer field) has been saying as much for years. I think this is his latest: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=954
Beats a roast beef sandwich, but I'm pretty sure the annealing algo in R is faster on my laptop, and I know it costs less. I'd love to be wrong, but it doesn't look real promising. As I understand things, their gizmo works a lot like the early "NMR quantum computers" -those were pretty controversial from the get go. There have been a couple of "quantum computer language" gizmos; I'm pretty sure I fired one up in 2004, when I was still in grad school. It's not clear that any particular paradigm is useful for this sort of thing. If they ever build one, I bet it would look like C/assembler for a long time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_programming#Quantum_computing_language I'm a fan of optical and analog computing as well. Back when I was trying to think about these things, I was talking myself into the idea that you could build the Grover algorithm (classically) optically. As that was over 10 years ago, and nobody thought of it since then, I'm a lot less sure now. Still, it would be nice if people were to think about alternate computing technologies a little more. Some of the stuff that was happening in the 60s (everything from analog, to noise-based, to hydraulic microprocessors) was pretty interesting. Every once in a while, people make wild claims about analog computing paradigms. They're probably mistakes; a standard error is to implicitly assume you can exactly encode a real number on an analog computer, which makes things like protractors capable of solving NP-hard problems. But it seems like folks should think of something besides silicon lithography once in a while. -SL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
