Hi Scott Thanks for this and the links. Ten years ago I was as skeptical as you and hadn't thought much about it since. I guess when I saw NASA and Google buying D-Wave machines I assumed there was something they could do. The Quantum Story then is just the latest version of the Emperor's New Clothes?
Donna Y [email protected] On 2013-10-17, at 11:04 PM, Scott Locklin <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
