D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a
quantum computing company, based in
Burnaby,
British Columbia, Canada. On May 11, 2011, D-Wave Systems announced
D-Wave One, described as "the world's first commercially available quantum computer," operating on a 128-
qubit chipset using
quantum annealing (a general method for finding the global minimum of a function by a process using
quantum fluctuations) to solve
optimization problems. In May 2013 it was announced that a collaboration between
NASA,
Google and the
Universities Space Research Association (USRA) launched a
Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab based on the
D-Wave Two 512-qubit quantum computer that would be used for research into machine learning, among other fields of study.
The D-Wave One was built on early prototypes such as D-Wave's Orion Quantum Computer. The prototype was a 16-qubit quantum annealing processor, demonstrated on February 13, 2007 at the
Computer History Museum in
Mountain View, California. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit quantum annealing processor on November 12, 2007. The chip was fabricated at the NASA
Jet Propulsion Laboratory microdevices lab in Pasadena, California.
Technology description
In June 2010 the D-Wave processor was described as comprising a programmable
superconducting integrated circuit with up to 128 pair-wise coupled superconducting
flux qubits. The 128-qubit processor was superseded by a 512-qubit processor in 2013. The processor is designed to implement a special-purpose quantum annealing as opposed to being operated as a universal
gate-model quantum computer.
D-Wave maintains a list of peer-reviewed technical publications by their own scientists and others on their website.
Reception
D-Wave was originally criticized by some scientists in the quantum computing field. On May 16, 2013 NASA and Google, together with a consortium of universities, announced a partnership with D-Wave to investigate how D-Wave's computers could be used in the creation of artificial intelligence. Prior to announcing this partnership, NASA, Google, and Universities Space Research Association put a D-Wave computer through a series of benchmark and acceptance tests, which it passed. Independent researchers found that D-Wave's computers could solve some problems as much as 3,600 times faster than particular software packages running on conventional digital computers. Other independent researchers found that different software packages running on a single core of a desktop computer can solve those same problems as fast or faster than D-Wave's computers (at least 12,000 times faster for
quadratic assignment problems, and between 1 and 50 times faster for
quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems).
In 2007
Umesh Vazirani, a professor at
University of California (UC)
Berkeley and one of the founders of quantum complexity theory, made the following criticism:
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Their claimed speedup over classical algorithms appears to be based on a misunderstanding of a paper my colleagues van Dam, Mosca and I wrote on "The power of adiabatic quantum computing." That speed up unfortunately does not hold in the setting at hand, 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.
Wim van Dam, a professor at UC
Santa Barbara, summarized the scientific community consensus as of 2008 in the journal
Nature Physics:
At the moment it is impossible to say if D-Wave's quantum computer is intrinsically equivalent to a classical computer or not. So until more is known about their error rates, caveat emptor is the least one can say.
An article in the May 12, 2011 edition of
Nature gives details which critical academics say proves that the company's chips do have some of the
quantum mechanical properties needed for quantum computing. Prior to the 2011
Nature paper, D-Wave was criticized for lacking proof that its computer was in fact a quantum computer. Nevertheless, questions remained due to the lack of conclusive experimental proof of quantum entanglement inside D-Wave devices.
MIT professor
Scott Aaronson, who describes himself as "Chief D-Wave Skeptic", said that D-Wave's 2007 demonstration did not prove anything about the workings of the Orion computer, and that its marketing claims were deceptive. In May 2011 he said that he was "retiring as Chief D-wave Skeptic", and reporting his "skeptical but positive" views based on a visit to D-Wave in February 2012. Aaronson said that one of the most important reasons for his new position on D-Wave was the 2011 Nature article. In May 16, 2013 he resumed his skeptic post. He criticizes D-Wave for blowing up results out of proportion on press releases that claim speedups of three orders of magnitude, in light of a paper 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.
In January 2014 researchers at UC Berkeley and
IBM published a classical model reproducing the D-Wave machine's observed behavior, suggesting that it may not be a quantum computer.
In March 2014, researchers at
University College London and the
University of Southern California (USC) published a paper comparing data obtained from a D-Wave Two computer with three possible explanations from classical physics and one quantum model. They found that their quantum model was a better fit to the experimental data than the Shin-Smith-Smolin-Vazirani classical model, and a much better fit than any of the other classical models. The authors conclude that "This suggests that an open system quantum dynamical description of the D-Wave device is well-justified even in the presence of relevant thermal excitations and fast single-qubit decoherence."
In May 2014, researchers at D-Wave, Google, USC,
Simon Fraser University, and National Research
Tomsk Polytechnic University published a paper containing experimental results that demonstrated the presence of entanglement among D-Wave qubits. Qubit tunneling spectroscopy was used to measure the energy
eigenspectrum of two and eight-qubit systems, demonstrating their coherence during a critical portion of the quantum annealing procedure.
A study published in
Science in June 2014, described as "likely the most thorough and precise study that has been done on the performance of the D-Wave machine" and "the fairest comparison yet", found that the D-Wave chip "produced no quantum speedup". The researchers, led by Matthias Troyer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, found "no quantum evidence" across the entire range of their tests, and only inconclusive results when looking at subsets of the tests. Several possible explanations were suggested.
- Perhaps quantum annealing (the type of problem for which the D-Wave machine is designed) is not amenable to a speedup.
- Perhaps the D-Wave 2 cannot realize a quantum speedup.
- Perhaps the speedup exists but is masked by errors or other problems.
D-Wave was originally criticized by some scientists in the quantum computing field. On May 16, 2013 NASA and Google, together with a consortium of universities, announced a partnership with D-Wave to investigate how D-Wave's computers could be used in the creation of artificial intelligence. Prior to announcing this partnership, NASA, Google, and Universities Space Research Association put a D-Wave computer through a series of benchmark and acceptance tests, which it passed. Independent researchers found that D-Wave's computers could solve some problems as much as 3,600 times faster than particular software packages running on conventional digital computers. Other independent researchers found that different software packages running on a single core of a desktop computer can solve those same problems as fast or faster than D-Wave's computers (at least 12,000 times faster for quadratic assignment problems, and between 1 and 50 times faster for quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems).
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