A new study testing the speed of quantum computers and conventional computers has proven that quantum is far from being the fastest computer on the planet, with the speed test indicating a draw between the two computers.
Even though it was marketed earlier to have the ability to solve problems that are way past the range of traditional computers, the quantum computer produced by Canadian firm D-Wave Systems is still far from the company's intended goals.
“The D-Wave computer, marketed as a groundbreaking quantum machine that runs circles around conventional computers, solves problems no faster than an ordinary rival, a new test shows,” states the study, Quantum or not, controversial computer yields no speedup, published by the Science Magazine this June.
Along with colleagues, physicist Matthias Troyer at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich says that the time it took the quantum computer to solve a setback increased exponentially with the size of the setback, just like a conventional computer. As the problem or setback’s size grows, the quantum computer does not show quantum speedup.
“To be useful, you need it to have speed-up. And so far we have not seen that. That doesn’t mean that it can’t exist," Troyer points out to National Post.
D-Wave, however, refutes that the computations used and made in the study were too easy to even show what the innovative chips of their quantum devices can actually do. Its co-founder and chairman also says Troyer’s research might be outmoded already.
“They need to pick problems that are much harder,” Colin Williams, a computer scientist and D-Wave’s business development director, tells Wired.
Williams cites a recent study done by Itay Hen, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, which shows that D-Wave’s quantum machines computed much faster than a conventional computer. Hen even presented some results during the Third Workshop in Adiabatic Quantum Computing last week in Los Angeles yet reminded that his work is still in its preliminary stages.
D-Wave Systems insists that its quantum computers perform faster thousands of times than any of the conventional personal computers.
“Rather than store information as 0s or 1s as conventional computers do, a quantum computer uses qubits – which can be a 1 or a 0 or both at the same time. This 'quantum superposition,' along with the quantum effects of entanglement and quantum tunnelling, enable quantum computers to consider and manipulate all combinations of bits simultaneously, making quantum computation powerful and fast,” reads the description from the D-Wave Systems website.
A venture capitalist, Haig Farris also says to the National Post that the physicist's research is “one snip in a continuum, one little piece of information.”
“If you go back to the start of computing in the ’50s, when they first commercialized the transistor, all the transistors could do in those days was run a tiny little clock. It took 50 years and a trillion dollars worth of expenditures to get the whole computing industry where it is today. So we’re a step along that way, and we’re very early stages. Whatever [Prof. Troyer] has to say a year or two from now will be irrelevant,” Farris adds.
Other researchers call such test of the controversial quantum computer the fairest comparison so far. It also appears some people in the quantum computing industry were convinced by Troyer’s research, however.
“What D-Wave’s people have claimed is they can manipulate information with the rules of quantum mechanics and have a gain at doing this. What we see from the paper … is that no such gain has been seen up to now,” Raymond Laflamme, executive director at University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, says to National Post.
Wim van Dam, a computer scientist from University of California, Santa Barbara, also thinks Troyer’s study is solid, putting a big question mark on D-Wave System’s promise of a significant speedup from its quantum computing.
