Better yet, Rose and Ladizinsky predicted that a quantum annealer wouldnt be as fragile as a gate system. They wouldnt need to precisely time the interactions of individual qubits. And they suspected their machine would work even if only some of the qubits were entangled or tunneling; those functioning qubits would still help solve the problem more quickly. And since the answer a quantum annealer kicks out is the lowest energy state, they also expected it would be more robust, more likely to survive the observation an operator has to make to get the answer out. The adiabatic model is intrinsically just less corrupted by noise, says Williams, the guy who wrote the book that got Rose started.

By 2003, that vision was attracting investment. Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson wanted to get in on what he saw as the next big wave of computing that would propel machine intelligence everywherefrom search engines to self-driving cars. A smart Wall Street bank, Jurvetson says, could get a huge edge on its competition by being the first to use a quantum computer to create ever-smarter trading algorithms. He imagines himself as a banker with a D-Wave machine: A torrent of cash comes my way if I do this well, he says. And for a bank, the $10 million cost of a computer is peanuts. Oh, by the way, maybe I buy exclusive access to D-Wave. Maybe I buy all your capacity! Thats just, like, a no-brainer to me. D-Wave pulled in $100 million from investors like Jeff Bezos and In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

The D-Wave team huddled in a rented lab at the University of British Columbia, trying to learn how to control those tiny loops of niobium. Soon they had a one-qubit system. It was a crappy, duct-taped-together thing, Rose says. Then we had two qubits. And then four. When their designs got more complicated, they moved to larger-scale industrial fabrication.

As I watch, Hilton pulls out one of the wafers just back from the fab facility. Its a shiny black disc the size of a large dinner plate, inscribed with 130 copies of their latest 512-qubit chip. Peering in closely, I can just make out the chips, each about 3 millimeters square. The niobium wire for each qubit is only 2 microns wide, but its 700 microns long. If you squint very closely you can spot one: a piece of the quantum world, visible to the naked eye.

Hilton walks to one of the giant, refrigerated D-Wave black boxes and opens the door. Inside, an inverted pyramid of wire-bedecked, gold-plated copper discs hangs from the ceiling. This is the guts of the device. It looks like a steampunk chandelier, but as Hilton explains, the gold plating is key: It conducts heatnoiseup and out of the device. At the bottom of the chandelier, hanging at chest height, is what they call the coffee can, the enclosure for the chip. This is where we go from our everyday world, Hilton says, to a unique place in the universe.

By 2007, D-Wave had managed to produce a 16-qubit system, the first one complicated enough to run actual problems. They gave it three real-world challenges: solving a sudoku, sorting people at a dinner table, and matching a molecule to a set of molecules in a database. The problems wouldnt challenge a decrepit Dell. But they were all about optimization, and the chip actually solved them. That was really the first time when I said, holy crap, you know, this things actually doing what we designed it to do, Rose says. Back then we had no idea if it was going to work at all. But 16 qubits wasnt nearly enough to tackle a problem that would be of value to a paying customer. He kept pushing his team, producing up to three new designs a year, always aiming to cram more qubits together.

When the team gathers for lunch in D-Waves conference room, Rose jokes about his own reputation as a hard-driving taskmaster. Hilton is walking around showing off the 512-qubit chip that Google just bought, but Rose is demanding the 1,000-qubit one. Were never happy, Rose says. We always want something better.

Geordie always focuses on the trajectory, Hilton says. He always wants whats next.

In 2010, D-Waves first customers came calling. Lockheed Martin was wrestling with particularly tough optimization problems in their flight control systems. So a manager named Greg Tallant took a team to Burnaby. We were intrigued with what we saw, Tallant says. But they wanted proof. They gave D-Wave a test: Find the error in an algorithm. Within a few weeks, D-Wave developed a way to program its machine to find the error. Convinced, Lockheed Martin leased a $10 million, 128-qubit machine that would live at a USC lab.

The next clients were Google and NASA. Hartmut Neven was another old friend of Roses; they shared a fascination with machine intelligence, and Neven had long hoped to start a quantum lab at Google. NASA was intrigued, because it often faced wickedly hard best-fit problems. We have the Curiosity rover on Mars, and if we want to move it from point A to point B there are a lot of possible routesthats a classic optimization problem, says NASAs Rupak Biswas. But before Google executives would put down millions, they wanted to know the D-Wave worked. In the spring of 2013, Rose agreed to hire a third party to run a series of Neven-designed tests, pitting D-Wave against traditional optimizers running on regular computers. Catherine McGeoch, a computer scientist at Amherst College, agreed to run the tests, but only under the condition that she report her results publicly.

Original post:

The Age of Quantum Computing Has (Almost) Arrived