D-Wave is now planning to venture into the quantum computing realm towards gate-based computers to perform logical operations on individual qubits. The problem, however, is that not a lot of people might be interested in QUBO.
Complexity of Gate-Based Systems
According to ArsTechnica, despite the complexity of gate-based systems, there could be a way to make them out of a number of qubits which include ions, photons, and electronic devices known as transmons. There is another form of computing known as annealing, which involves manipulating collections of other interconnected qubits.
Annealing remains a theory that is well matched to a class of optimization problems, and when it comes to hardware, there's only a company called D-Wave behind them. Things started to get more confusing as D-Wave released a roadmap for the company's upcoming processors and software for its very own quantum annealers.
D-Wave Advantage Processor
D-Wave, however, is also announcing that it is going to be developing its very own gate-based hardware, which would parallel along with the quantum annealer. D-Wave's current processor, known as the Advantage, already has 5,000 qubits and 40,000 connections among them.
It was noted that users of D-Wave's own cloud service would get access to an updated version of its Advantage. The qubit, as well as connection stats, will reportedly remain the same, but the device will actually be less influenced by the noise found in the system. In 2015, it was shared that Google's D-Wave 2x quantum computer functioned 100 million times faster compared to a regular computer chip that doesn't run D-wave hardware.
D-Wave QUBO
In more technical terms, its own qubits will actually maintain their own coherence much longer. This particular update will allow users to be able to solve larger problems with a greater deal of precision as well as higher probability of correctness due to the new fabrication process that is being used.
D-Wave also provides a number of developer tools that it calls Ocean. In the previous iterations, Ocean has actually allowed a number of people to take a step back from directly having to control the hardware. If a problem could be expressed as quadratic unconstrained binary optimization or QUBO, Ocean could easily produce the commands that are needed to run the problem on the optimizer.
Read Also: Quantum computing: Is it real or is it hype?
Problems with QUBO
D-Wave notes that this is a hybrid problem solver since Ocean could also use classical computing in order to optimize the QUBO before its execution. The problem, as of the moment, is that not everyone that might want to try out D-Wave hardware could be familiar with QUBO or know how to express their own problems as QUBO. Another problem could also be the price, as D-Wave's 2,000 Qubit quantum computer sold for a whopping $15 million.
The new version of Ocean will reportedly allow another layer of abstraction by allowing problems to be sent directly to the system in the format that is typically used by certain people who tend to solve those particular sorts of problems. If it does work out, however, this could then eliminate a huge roadblock that could keep people from testing whether D-Wave's own hardware would offer a speed-up on their own problems.
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Written by Urian B.
