PoliTech's Journal: 16-qubit Quantum Computer Successfully Demonstrated

D-Wave held a Quantum Computer demo today at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. The actual Quantum Computer itself is located back at the company's British Columbia HQ. headquarters.

D-Wave qubits in the era of Quantum Computing

D-Wave showed three examples of Orion in action, marking the first such demonstration of a quantum computer. The most impressive display came during a drug molecule matching exercise, while two less impressive efforts had Orion crunch through a party table seating arrangement that paired like-minded guests and then go on to solve a SudoQ puzzle.

But there's only so much you can do with 16 qubits. So, D-Wave plans to produce a 32 qubit chip by the fourth quarter, a 512 qubit chip in the first quarter of 2008 and then a 1,024 qubit chip in the third quarter of 2008. D-Wave next year will also allow customers to send calculations to the Orion system via the internet and then have calculations returned to the customer and then later in 2008 ship actual systems.

The cost for such boxes will likely be comparable to large, high performance computing clusters.

Of course, these grand plans might fail to occur.

"It could turn out that these systems are not protected (from interference) the way we thought that they are," Rose said. "If so, this system could dead-end after 16 qubits.

"If you combine too many of these devices together and you are not good enough at filtering out the noises, then you will end up with a hunk of a (trashed) computer."

Start-ups rarely admit to such disastrous possibilities, as you all know too well.

Read it all here...

I'll be on the lookout for reports by attendees. But no matter how you slice it, this is an exciting development and this demonstration will help to drive competing QC models to more rapid development.

I'm sure that my video encoding projects could benefit!

Here is Steve Jurvetsons Flickr blog where you can find some great pictures of the Quantum Computer equipment.

Endgadget's take ... funny.

Some technical papers for interested folks!

ARS Technica has more news here.

The D-Wave blog (rose blog)

Here is some more good "Quantum" reading from ARS Technica: Quantum Deathmatch: PvNP

I just hope that the new parallel universe we just switched to is the one where I hit the lottery!