Re:Turn down the quantum volume
by core-questions on Friday March 06, 2020 @12:06AM
(#22501129)
Yeah, I'm just a sysadmin so I don't really get it either, but I've been following them for a while out of a layman's interest. My understanding is that there was already a body of work in the direction of optimization problems formulated as "Ising Hamiltonians", which is some mathematical construct that it's hard to calculate the lowest-energy configuration for; D-Wave took the most practical route to yielding actual working qubits possible, and can solve those Ising problems on there.
What we're forced to imagine is a future 5-10 years from now when they have 10k or 20k qubits, or they're all way more connected together, or something like that; there comes a point at which it will truly be very useful for big problems, and so the speculative player who wants to profit off of this would spend their time trying to actually make working models of something useful in reality which uses such an optimization solver as an engine underneath.
And its shorthand for "computation which demands more than just inference across the statistical sum of the semi-incoherent output states you see in a sea of things" which as I understand it, is what D-Wave does: it emits all the things, and you do work to find the answer (which usually you knew a-priori btw, another gap in my feelings on QC right now: the worked examples always include for-knowledge of the "right" answer to help decode it from the output states of the QC under consideration)
BTW if I mis-characterize either the state of QC or D-Wave I apologize. I am not in the field. I get this view, from what little I can understand.