[scottlocklin]

Again, as I said before: even assuming they didn't take shortcuts (the paper you mention is essentially "we took shortcut X instead of Y" -and of course, no quantum error correction is evident): congratulations, your miracle technology is now capable of factoring the number 15. All they have to do now is add all the things that make quantum computing useful and eventually they will honestly be able to factor the number 21. Should happen ... I dunno, care to make a prediction when?

Pointing this out is apparently necessary; I don't know why it triggers people so to point out that virtually the entire field up to the present day has consisted of grandstanding quasi-frauds. And that you apparently have to understand things and read extremely carefully to notice, because whatever honest workers there may be don't see it as in their interest to point such things out as it may upset their rice bowls.

You have someone else in another thread insisting that annealing can factor giant prime numbers which is equally bullshit. Do you expect me to patiently, precisely and (somehow) dispassionately point out every line of bullshit in every quantum computing paper published? The mere fact that the field is pervasive with bullshit, publishes papers and announcements that are known to be bullshit, and promises all kinds of pixie dust bullshit on a regular basis ought to give you some slight skepticism, some Bayesian prior that the grand pronunciamentos of this clown car should be treated with a bit of skepticism.

[gjm11]

I agree that "can factor 15" isn't terribly impressive. (Well, it's kinda impressive, because making a quantum computer do anything at all is really hard.) I very much agree that D-Wave's quantum annealing stuff is bullshit, especially if anyone is claiming it's any good for factoring large numbers. I don't expect you, or anyone, to point out every bit of bullshit in every paper published.

I'm all in favour of pointing out bullshit. But there's a boy-who-cried-wolf problem if you just indiscriminately claim that everything is the same kind of bullshit without checking it.

Of course that doesn't mean that you're obliged to check everything. You can say "I expect this is bullshit of the usual sort but haven't checked". But if you say "this is bullshit of the usual sort" without checking and it turns out that that isn't the case (it looks to me as if the paper I linked to isn't the kind of bullshit you describe) then you take a credibility hit that makes all your bullshit-spotting much less useful than if you were more careful.