Sweet cephalopods at the D-Wave Board Meeting today, abuzz with the watershed 100,000,000x speedup news.

Thanks Haig! People were buzzing because Google just announced their watershed results in quantum computing using their D-Wave Two.

It is rare to see a 100,000,000x leap in computing power… at least in this universe! =)

Has there ever been a leap forward like this in human history? (in any thing, like computing, energy processing, transportation… I am guessing there have purely algorithmic advances of this magnitude, but having trouble thinking of a single advance of this scale)

At the announcement event at NASA Ames, the Googlers were viscerally excited about the application of this to machine learning.
“It used to be garbage in, garbage out. Now we have garbage in, gold out” — Harmut Nevin, Google Research

And it just so happens that the new structure in the next generation D-Wave processor is called the “Flux Capacitor Layer”…. Seriously.

arxiv.org/abs/1512.02206

It is a truly disruptive technology that could change how we do everything,” — Deepak Biswas, NASA Ames in MIT Tech Review

Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance nailed it: “Google revealed on Tuesday that recent test calculations show a D-Wave computer can obliterate a standard computer chip on some tasks. In one test, the D-Wave machine needed just a single second to process calculations that would have taken a standard machine 10,000 years to solve. Overall, Google said the quantum machines appeared to perform 100 million times faster on certain problems. Such a speedup would be a true rarity in the history of computing.”

“Because the operating system of nature, as far as we understand it, is quantum physics, you need a process that acts on quantum physics to describe parts of the universe,” Neven said. “Sooner or later, quantum computers will be the tool of choice to solve these problems.”

Google announced that an earlier D-Wave system beat their data center in 2009 in machine learning, and today’s announcement was for the important optimization technique called simulated annealing. Google Research: “we regard simulated annealing as a generic classical competition that quantum annealing needs to beat. We are optimistic that the significant runtime gains we have found will carry over to commercially relevant problems as they occur in tasks relevant to machine intelligence.”

Here are my D-wave posts over the past 12 years.