[greenmountin]

This is absurd. That's a comment on a blog post, proposing a bombastic title, "Better than Shor". I'm pretty sure if they could get anywhere near Shor using their architecture they'd get more than a sympathy Nature paper.

The truth is, D-Wave has done nothing to foster the coherence of their "qubits", and so they have built a very expensive, superconducting, classical computer. There is no quantum trick, actually. You have a system of buckets and you adjust the pipes and pumps between them so that in steady-state the water levels solve some problem you program in (with the pumps). Then you start in a random configuration, turn on the earthquake machine for a bit of randomness, and end up in the "ground state" solution.

The exponential speedup of quantum algorithms is sketchy enough: good luck performing an N-qubit logic gate, or in assuming that it's your favorite black-box that need only be executed a polynomial number of times (every quantum computing textbook uses their own set of universal gates). But these guys aren't even trying.

[sp332]

There is an adiabatic factoring algorithm. http://phys.org/news/2012-04-largest-factored-quantum-algori...

[mtrimpe]

Indeed. It's still quadratic time but it's a significant step up.

[pfedor]

The truth is, D-Wave has done nothing to foster the coherence of their "qubits", and so they have built a very expensive, superconducting, classical computer. There is no quantum trick, actually.

Scott Aaronson, the self-described "Chief D-Wave Skeptic", disagrees with you:

Now, I’d say, D-Wave finally has cleared the evidence-for-entanglement bar—and, while they’re not the first to do so with superconducting qubits, they’re certainly the first to do so with so many superconducting qubits. So I congratulate D-Wave on this accomplishment. If this had been advertised from the start as a scientific research project—”of course we’re a long way from QC being practical— —but we’ve shown experimentally that can entangle 100 superconducting qubits with controllable couplings”—my reaction would’ve been, “cool!” -- http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400

[gaze]

Quantum annealing is a real thing. Probably could make for some pretty fast optimization. What's the problem?