Actually, this is exactly what they are doing now.

Anybody who would have detected the neglect could have become this boy's superhero.

The monument is to remind us here in Ontario that we have to try harder.

Social services, the school records, neighbors ... there are countless ways this tragedy could, and should have been prevented.

"I really don't feel too bad for those who let him starve and now want a monument."

What the F*** are you talking about. The ones who starved him are in jail.

The man sponsoring the monument simply does so because he feels the poor boy deserves to be remembered as a stark reminder that we have to try harder to prevent such abuse.

Anybody could have been this boy's Superman if only the neglect would have been detected earlier.

Yes, but you can distinguish quantum annealing behavior from regular thermal annealing. And when you compare the D-Wave device to simulations of both it conforms much closer to the former.

Also the extreme temperature sensitivity is more indicative of actual quantum annealing.

Simulated annealing on a non-digital chip?

I think you may want to think this over one more time.

Buddy, I have a physics degree too, so does Matthias Troyer and Geordie Rose.

Eight qubit entanglement has been demonstrated.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.3500...

.... maybe the slahdot stub should have had a link to hear from the horse's mouth?

In this interview Matthias Troyer puts his team's results into the correct context.

It is not gate based universal quantum computing but special purpose quantum annealing.

If you accept this as a valid approach to quantum computing has certainly been the subject of much debate.

Do you know how to use a search engine?

Are you aware of scholar.google.com?

It's really not hard to find papers like this or this.

And yes, the Matthias Troyer who co-authored the first paper is the same guy who conducted the performance study that the /. blurb references.

That D-Wave performs quantum annealing can be regarded as settled. The only question that remains is how useful this may be.

Eight years ago everybody (myself included) thought D-Wave was a scam or just crazy. As new facts emerge smart people (such as Matthias) adjust their judgment.

The machine is not faster than conventional machines at this point.

But Troyer et. al. actually confirmed that the D-Wave machine is performing quantum annealing as advertised.

In order to perform on the same level they used a highly optimized solver, not off-the-shelf optimizer software that the D-Wave machine outperforms handily.

Originally I meant to bet with Matthias Troyer if the D-Wave machine was truly a quantum annealer. At the time Matthias wrote me:

""Actually, we can't bet anymore since I know the results that we're going to publish and we'll say yes to quantum :-). We should have done the bet a year ago."

So we decided to bet if the current crop of D-Wave machines can already beat conventional computing.

Obviously I lost that bet, but not by much.

It will be interesting to see how the next chip generation will fare, there is still lots of room for higher qubit integration. In comparison to conventional CMOS the D-Wave chip structures are huge.

Conventional chip design doesn't have lots of room at the bottom any more. D-Wave on the other hand still has plenty of room at the bottom.

That's why I will continue to bet on them.

Find this very readable as well. So far from what I've seen I like the language.

That would make sense if bitcoins were only supposed to replace actual physical money, but my understanding is that the ultimate goal is far grander.

Unicorns and fairy dust are much cheaper, they don't require CPU intensive mining.

Bitcoins should be priced in CO2