Assessing claims of quantum annealing: Does D-Wave have a quantum computer?

Assessing claims of quantum annealing: Does D-Wave have a quantum computer?

Seminar author:John Smolin

Event date and time:02/13/2014 03:00:pm

Event location:Sala de Graus II (torre C5)

Event contact:

There has recently been much publicity surrounding D-Wave’s
  so-called quantum computing machines.  Though there is little reason
  to expect that their highly decoherent devices actually perform
  quantum computation, they have persisted in making strong claims
  about the performance of their system in the scientific literature
  and to the press.  Here we focus on showing that the evidence of
  quantumness given in the literature is extremely weak and is
  consistent with an effective classical description.  We further show
  by comparing to the performance of classical simulated
  annealing that the idea that their current  machines outperform a classical 
  computer is unfounded.