Google appears to be more confident about the technical capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which it operates alongside NASA. D-Wave’s machines are the closest thing we have today to quantum computing, which works with quantum bits or qubits.
The superposition of these qubits enable machines to make great numbers of computations to simultaneously, making a quantum computer highly desirable for certain types of processes. In two tests, the Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab today announced that it has found the D-Wave machine to be considerably faster than simulated annealing, a simulation of quantum computation on a classical computer chip.
A Google director of engineering, Hartmut Neven, went over the results of the tests in a blog post:
We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1,000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core.
We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 108.