WIRED Editorial Superposition on D-Wave and The Age of Quantum Computing

The print edition just arrived… and the online version has already cycled through two entirely different headlines. Opening of article:

“Google owns a lot of computers—perhaps a million servers stitched together into the fastest, most powerful artificial intelligence on the planet. But last August, Google teamed up with NASA to acquire what may be the search giant’s most powerful piece of hardware yet. It’s certainly the strangest.

Optimization is a key part of Google’s seemingly magical facility with data, and Neven says the techniques the company uses are starting to peak. “They’re about as fast as they’ll ever be,” he says.

That leaves Google—and all of computer science, really—just two choices: Build ever bigger, more power-hungry silicon-based computers. Or find a new way out, a radical new approach to computation that can do in an instant what all those other million traditional machines, working together, could never pull off, even if they worked for years.

Unless it’s not a quantum computer at all. Quantum computing is so new and so weird that no one is entirely sure whether the D-Wave is a quantum computer or just a very quirky classical one. Not even the people who build it know exactly how it works and what it can do. That’s what Neven is trying to figure out, sitting in his Google lab, week in, week out, patiently learning to talk to the D-Wave. If he can figure out the puzzle—what this box can do that nothing else can, and how—then boom. “It’s what we call ‘quantum supremacy,’” he says. “Essentially, something that cannot be matched anymore by classical machines.” It would be, in short, a new computer age.”

And here is a video I took visiting the soul of the new machine…. and for the curious, D-Wave will be hosting a webinar on quantum computing on June 12.