D-Wave and Quantum Computation
D-Wave (http://www.dwavesys.com/) has recently received $17m in C-round funding from International Investment and Underwriting (IIU) of Dublin, with the active support of its earlier investors. The Company says that it will use the funds for product development, operations, and business development. This investment is clearly a long-term one: the investors are investing in the intellectual property for future development rather than a system close to being ready to go to market. One must praise them for taking such a pragmatic view. After all, the technical issues surrounding quantum computing (QC) are manifold and are not about to be resolved in the short term, so the investors are backing what has to be seen as a high risk venture. That being said the partner list shown at Supercomputing’07 looked impressive.
There are about a dozen candidates for fundamental QC technologies: that is to say technologies that might form the basis for a realistic quantum computer. There is also a gap between QC theorists and practitioners. The applications that D-Wave has demonstrated certainly seem both realistic and pertinent to the concerns of at least some real-world programmers. Some in the QC community are sceptical as to what has been demonstrated and whether or not what has been demonstrated is really suitable for commercialisation.
The principal technical difficulties in any quantum system surround the creation of what are called entangled quantum states and keeping them “stable” for long enough to execute an algorithm and ultimately to allow extraction of the results. Although the theory has been around since at least the early 1980s, and quantum theory itself since the early-1920s, creating a working quantum computer is not “just” a question of finding an engineering solution to the problems of containment. The problems that need to be addressed also concern the fundamentals of interaction in our world. The system demonstrated by D-Wave uses 16 qubits (quantum bits). While this may not seem a very great achievement, most other systems demonstrated to date have used far fewer qubits.
The applications that D-Wave has demonstrated certainly seem both realistic and pertinent to the concerns of at least some real-world programmers. Although various algorithms are designed to run on a quantum system, such as Shor's algorithm for factoring or Grover's algorithm for searching unsorted databases; and quantum computing languages actually exist, QC-based systems aren't going to make the departmental server in the next purchasing round. BUT, and here is the main issue, when and in whatever form quantum computers do make it into the mainstream then they will make a huge difference in certain applications areas. In particular, security will become a major issue because existing systems will become potentially vulnerable. Quantum computers will change the nature of security since encryption algorithms that are currently deemed “computationally infeasible” on current digital computers become extremely fast on quantum ones. Systems that were once deemed safe will no longer be so unless they themselves employ new encryption and security strategies based on QC.
Is quantum computing the Next Big Thing? Definitely not. If the problems were all to be solved tomorrow, it still wouldn't be. It took a long time to get from Bardeen, Shockley and Brattain's demonstration of the transistor to integrated circuits, and longer still for us to reach the all-pervasive x86 and its myriad relations, with its large and established market. Our ability to exploit technology rapidly will ensure that it takes a lot less than the half-century we took to make that journey. Along the way there will be a lot of innovative technology to be developed and patents to be filed. If D-Wave make it then the investors will make a lot of money and the company will probably get bought by IBM or Intel.