Millions of years difference: D-Wave quantum computer performs a useful task for the first time

D-Wave said its Advantage2 quantum computers are the first computers in the world to perform a useful task that is too difficult for traditional computing machines. Details were reported by New Scientist.

D-Wave says its Advantage2 quantum computer can calculate problems in the transverse-field Ising model, a quantum version of the mathematical approach to how matter behaves when it changes state, such as from a liquid to a gas. This is difficult to achieve with a conventional computer, so this achievement is called “computing supremacy” – the next step from “quantum supremacy”.

For a long time, scientists have said that quantum computers could outperform even the best semiconductor supercomputers at solving some problems that would take too much time and energy to do the same task. In 2019, Google became the first company to demonstrate so-called “quantum supremacy,” but only during a benchmark test that had no practical use.

Now D-Wave is pitting its Advantage against the world’s most powerful classical computer, the US’s Frontier. The company claims that solving the same problem would take millions of years and require more electricity than the world produces in a year. He rejected New Scientist’s request and refused to comment on the study until it had been peer-reviewed. But CEO Alan Baratz Wrote On social network X:

“We believe D-Wave is the first company in the world to demonstrate quantum supremacy in solving real-world problems. This was achieved with our latest generation Advantage2 quantum computer. These problems cannot be solved with classical computers, period.”

New Scientist notes that D-Wave’s “quantum annealing” computers are significantly different from computers from Google and many other manufacturers. They have been criticized for being able to solve only certain classes of optimization problems and cannot be considered full-fledged quantum computers that can solve any problem. Yuri Pashkin, a scientist at the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom, prefers to call D-Wave’s machine a “quantum system simulator” but agrees that the company is justified in making claims of computational superiority, albeit within a very narrow scenario.

“This is a very specific task, and what they show is not a universal computer or simulator. That’s it, it can’t be used for anything else,” Yuri Pashkin explained.

Although Ising model problems have obvious applications in physics, a number of optimization problems that may be useful in the fields of logistics and finance can also be solved in a similar way. As Yuri Pashkin adds, it is not yet known how many practical problems D-Wave computers can actually solve.

According to Josh Nunn of rival firm Orca Computing, D-Wave’s results look interesting and encouraging. They point out that so-called “noisy intermediate-sized quantum computers” (NISQ) such as D-Wave and Orca may already be useful for certain tasks and are therefore a viable technology.

“If you can start building machines that are useful to businesses and industry now, even if they have very limited use cases, that changes the business proposition and gets us closer to the time when quantum computing can become profitable or at least self-sustaining as an industry and not just require endless capital investment,” he said.

Josh Nunn also warned that the computational superiority of quantum systems is not yet final. Previously, scientists had managed to improve the algorithms of classical computers and again surpass the algorithms of quantum computers.

“People will start to challenge the results, and in a few months there may be another paper saying, ‘We found a classical algorithm that can do these simulations 10,000 times faster,'” the developer said.

They had previously written that Google was looking for ways to use quantum computers in practice. The company announced a contest with a prize of $5 million.