http://dwave.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/slides-from-sc07-progress-in-quantum-c... click on Mr. T for the power point file. (hah!) i love the prominent featuring of Google partnership on this project. surely Google / In-Q-Tel dollars will surge through the floodgates of measured skepticism shortly... some highlights: --- D-Wave approach: Superconducting adiabatic quantum computer - Extremely fast: Special purpose processor; superconducting electronics are naturally fast (700+ GHz) - Extremely low power: In principle reversible (zero heat generation); in practice power consumption & heat generation drastically reduced (factors of millions) - At the limits of physics: Universal quantum computer can't do better --- slides 14-21 are nice visualizations of the adiabatic QC implementation and use. --- adiabatic quantum computation model: - Computer initialized in "easy to reach" (convex) ground state - Answer encoded in final state - All currents adjusted slowly enough so that system remains in ground state at all times - AQC can be universal for QC [ed: this is the crux, algorithms to express some problems in AQC model difficult (right now)] - AQC is exact by definition --- quantum annealing computation model: - Computer initialized in ground state - Answer encoded in final state - All currents adjusted over period of time fixed by user [ed: key difference wrt AQC] - QA is a heuristic algorithm [ed: key difference wrt AQC] --- D-Wave processors can implement either AQC or QA models of computation. --- Summary of preliminary result - A set of progressively more powerful superconducting quantum processors have been built [ed: 28 qubits in demo] - Next generation Q3/2008 targets competition with incumbent QUBO solver methods (500+ qubits) - Web services architecture operational at several levels of abstraction from hardware; APIs documented and available