[p1esk]

Is there any actual QC hardware that can run these algorithms? Does it even make sense to say that you can "run" code on a quantum computer?

I don't follow this field much, but I remember there was a company called D-Wave, and people saying their product was not a "real" quantum computer. Has anything changed since?

[infinitewalk]

Actually, yes! ML algorithms using PennyLane have been run on the IBM Q Experience, using both our Qiskit plugin (https://github.com/carstenblank/pennylane-qiskit) and our ProjectQ plugin (https://github.com/xanaduai/pennylane-projectq).

I can't say much more at the moment, but we should have a few more plugins released in the next few weeks that targets hardware from other QC vendors.

The D-Wave question in an interesting one, though. Unlike the QC hardware available from IBM, Rigetti, Google, etc, which uses a universal circuit model, D-Wave has focused on a particular application - quantum annealing. While our theoretical quantum gradient results only apply to the qubit model, it is an interesting question whether they can be extended to the quantum annealing framework.

[p1esk]

I looked at the intro page for Pennylane project, and it went completely over my head. I'm a ML person, can you tell me how can quantum computation help me, or why would I want to consider it? For example, would I be able to train my neural networks faster on a quantum computer? What's the point?