according to Time magazine, one to an unidentifi ed US intelli- gence agency. The company’s investors include Goldman Sachs, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (which funded Skype and Tesla Motors) and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (For more on tech funding in Canada, see “Grow me the money,” on p. 50.) If D-Wave’s quantum computer is the real thing — the matter
appears to be open for debate — it should be able to perform 2512 simultaneous calculations. That’s a number much, much larger than the number of particles in the known universe. The catch is that D-Wave’s machines do not seem to be general-purpose computers; rather — as the company admits — they do some- thing called “quantum annealing,” which can be used to solve only a particular class of mathematical problems, known as “discrete combinatorial optimization” problems. (An example is the famous “travelling salesman problem,” in which a sales agent has to visit N cities, spread out at random, in the minimum amount of time.) “There’s been a lot of controversy about what exactly their
devices are doing,” says Steinberg, who serves on the company’s scientifi c advisory board. While it appears “something quantum is going on,” it’s not clear that D-Wave’s machines “can do a better job than classical algorithms.” Aaronson is more circum- spect. “D-Wave has gotten a lot of press by telling the world what it wants to hear,” he says. “Is it actually doing anything better than you could do it with a classical computer? The evidence now is that it isn’t.” Still, D-Wave has built something and inves- tors seem to be willing to gamble on it. Laforest says D-Wave’s contraption is, at the very least, “a great piece of engineering.”
in the 1930s and 1940s, to the fi rst general-purpose electronic computer — a room-sized machine known as ENIAC, unveiled in 1946. They’ve been getting faster (and smaller) ever since. Quantum computing, meanwhile, is in its infancy.
T
he classical computer evolved over more than a century, from wild-eyed 19th-century visions, through the crucial theoretical work of Alan Turing and John von Neumann
“I would say we don’t yet have the quantum-computing
analog of the transistor,” says Aaronson. “Right now we’re still at a pre-transistor stage; maybe even a pre-vacuum-tube stage. We’re definitely not at the ENIAC stage.” Steinberg is slightly more optimistic. Quantum computers will eventually be able to solve “problems that we care about,” he says, and will do so faster than any classical computer — but when we’ll get to that stage is up in the air; it could be a decade or more away. Then there is the question of who will want one. Back in 1943,
the chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, predicted a global demand “for maybe fi ve computers.” His mistake was that he underestimated how versatile computers could be and how many different kinds of problems they could be applied to. “People used to think these were adding machines,” muses Steinberg, motioning toward both the laptop and desktop com- puters in front of him. “The people who fi rst had the vision that we might use them for, say, word processing, were seen as a little crazy. The idea that we’d use them for images, for sending pic- tures — that was just beyond the realm of possibility.” Eventually, we began to see how much of the world can be treated as infor- mation; that much of what we do boils down to the fl ipping of 0s and 1s. Something similar may come to pass with quantum computers, Steinberg says. “We know they can manipulate infor- mation in certain new ways, faster than our existing computers can. We have to just explore and fi gure out what the applications of those kinds of manipulations are.” Back at IQC, Laforest is even more enthusiastic. Beyond the applications being discussed today, he says, are many more waiting to be discovered. “We’re talking about a transformative, disruptive type of technology.” Aſt er a brief pause, he adds: “I know I sound like a preacher — but that’s where the potential is. Just like silicon changed everything, quantum information has the potential to change everything.”
DAN FALK is a science journalist based in Toronto. His books include The Science of Shakespeare and In Search of Time
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© 2015 Robert Half Canada Inc. 0914-9014g JUNE/JULY 2015 | CPA MAGAZINE | 47
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