D-Wave Quantum Annealing Solving Protein Folding

 Have mentioned our linking with D-Wave for very large search problems, recently some news about their work in other spaces we also examined:  Protein Folding.  

Quantum Annealing by D-Wave

See: https://www.youtube.com/user/dwavesystems

Also  https://www.dwavesys.com/media/exqjbloj/dwave_menten-ai_case_story_v10.pdf

Also reported on here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z50kjnZXpXg&t=35s

D-Wave uses quantum method to solve protein folding problem    by Lisa Zyga , Phys.org

D-Wave One and CEO Geordie Rose. Image credit: D-Wave Systems, Inc.

(Phys.org) -- While there has been some skepticism as to whether the Canadian company D-Wave’s quantum computing system, the D-Wave One, truly involves quantum computing, the company is intent on proving that the system is both a quantum device as well as a useful one. In a new study, D-Wave CEO Geordie Rose and other D-Wave researchers have teamed up with Harvard quantum physicist Alán Aspuru-Guzik and post-doc Alejandro Perdomo-Ortiz to demonstrate that the D-Wave One system can solve the challenging task of finding the lowest-energy configuration of a folded protein.

The study, “Finding low-energy conformations of lattice protein models by quantum annealing,” is published in a recent issue of Nature’s Scientific Reports.

The computer used quantum annealing to find the lowest-energy protein configuration by solving for the configuration as an optimization problem, where the optimal state was the lowest-energy state. Proteins can be folded in a large number of ways because they’re made up of many chains of amino acids. Yet somehow, proteins almost always manage to fold themselves in the correct configuration (when they don’t fold correctly, they can cause misfolded-protein diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's). Scientists think that proteins fold themselves correctly because the correct configuration is also the state of lowest energy, the state at which the protein becomes stable.

In quantum annealing, the system starts by randomly picking a starting state, and then selecting random neighbor states to see if they have lower energies than the starting state. If they do, the computer replaces the original state with the lower-energy state. The process is considered quantum because it involves quantum tunneling to explore the different states by traveling directly through certain barriers rather than climbing over them. In this way, quantum annealing differs from the classical version, called “simulated annealing,” which explores different states based on temperature. Previous research has shown that quantum annealing has advantages over simulated annealing in some situations. ... ' 

Quantum Annealing Can Beat Classical Computing in Limited Cases

 Have mentioned Quantum Annealing methods here a number of time.  And D-Wave, a successful effort in delivering related capabilities as Quantum solutions.     Recall our short interaction with them and this system.    We also worked with Los Alamos Labs, below described their work.     Based on this report I do do not know how they relate.   May follow up. 

Quantum Annealing Can Beat Classical Computing in Limited Cases

By Los Alamos National Laboratory, August 17, 2022

Quantum annealing computers can run algorithms faster than classical computers in certain instances, but typically not when time is limited.

Nikolai Sinitsyn and Bin Yan at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory designed an analytical strategy to demonstrate a simple untuned process that solves any computational problem considered by a quantum annealing system, with computational accuracy characterized at any point during runtime. However, this accuracy is rarely superior to classical algorithmic performance because efficient quantum computing depends on quantum effects, while many quantum histories interfere to magnify the useful information in the final state.

Without fine-tuning, the proper interference becomes unlikely, though there are exceptions which leave the niche for superior quantum computing.

From Los Alamos National Laboratory

View Full Article      

D-Wave 500 Qubit Quantum Machine on the Cloud

Recall out interaction with D-Wave now dome time ago. often mentioned here. Qubit count is now  impressive.    They continue to advance with their specialty machines.     Would like to see more examples of their applications now.

D-Wave's 500-Qubit Machine Hits the Cloud   By IEEE Spectrum,  July 14, 2022

When quantum-computing pioneer D-Wave releases its next-generation Advantage2 system in 2023 or 2024, the company expects its 7,000-qubit machine to be the most powerful quantum computer of its kind in the world. Now D-Wave is making an experimental prototype of Advantage2 immediately available for use over the cloud.

Classical computers switch transistors either on or off to symbolize data as ones or zeroes. In contrast, quantum computers use quantum bits, or "qubits." Because of the strange nature of quantum physics, qubits can exist in a state called superposition, in which they are essentially both 1 and 0 at the same time. This phenomenon lets each qubit perform two calculations at once. The more qubits are quantum mechanically linked, or entangled, within a quantum computer, the greater its computational power can grow, in an exponential fashion.

The standard approach toward building quantum computers, called the gate model, involves arranging qubits in circuits and making them interact with each other in a fixed sequence. In contrast, D-Wave—based in Burnaby, B.C, Canada—has long focused on what are called annealing quantum computers. Quantum cousins of classical annealing computers, these machines find a lowest energy state by slowly cooling it down—in much the same way that metals and crystals are sometimes tempered so as to minimize imperfections. Quantum annealing machines, then, start off with a set of qubits whose interactions at their lowest energy state, called the ground state, represent the correct answer for a specific problem the researchers programmed it to solve.

From IEEE Spectrum

View Full Article 

D-Wave. Real Value with Quantum Computing

Just mentioned here. Much more at the link ....

Launch Your Quantum Journey Today:  D-Wave

Our customers are building quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, portfolio optimization, drug discovery, materials sciences, scheduling, fault detection, traffic congestion, and supply chain management. What problem can we help you solve?  

Get Started

Business Advantage Delivered Today

Our singular focus is to help customers achieve real value by using quantum computing for practical business applications.   

You may be surprised to learn that our enterprise customers have already built more than 250 early quantum applications across many industries.  

The powerful combination of the Advantage™ quantum system and the Leap™ hybrid solver services enable the first in-production quantum applications demonstrating business benefit.  

Unlock Your New Competitive Edge

Quantum computing has the potential to radically impact life sciences and healthcare. The most forward-thinking organizations have already gotten started. Industry associations like the Pistoia Alliance and QuPharm are working to advance this transformation.

Ready to Launch Your Quantum Project?

D-Wave Launch is designed to help enterprises go from problem discovery to production implementation and accelerate the quantum journey. Engage our in-house professional services teams and technical domain experts to help kick off your first quantum project, train your teams on quantum, and realize real business value faster.  ... ' 

Is Q-Day Coming?

Brought to my attention.   Note mention of D-Wave Annealing, recall we connected to  them.  Could this mean the ability to break most encryption?  Breaking many parts of security infrastructures.   Scary?  Encrypting better with annealing?   See also the most recent Security Now for more comments.     Is the claim about D-Wave accurate?  Following up. 

Q-Day Is Coming Sooner Than We Think  By Arthur Herman Contributor  in Forbes, introduction: 

I comment on quantum computing and AI, and American national security.

Jun 7, 2021,01:37pm EDT

“Q-Day” is the term some experts use to describe when large-scale quantum computers are able to factorize the large prime numbers that underlie our public encryption systems, such as the ones that are supposed to protect our bank accounts, financial markets, and most vital infrastructure. That’s a feat that’s all but impossible for even the fastest supercomputers but which the unique features of quantum computers, using the physics of superpositioning and entanglement, will be able to deliver.

There’s a growing consensus that this quantum threat is real; there’s no agreement how long it will take before a quantum computer has the 4000 or so stable qubits it will need to meet the requirements of Shor’s algorithm for cracking those encryption systems. 

For example, it would take a classical computer 300 trillion years to crack an RSA-2048 bit encryption key. A quantum computer can do the same job in just ten seconds with 4099 stable qubits—but getting to that number is the main problem quantum computer engineers face since the stability or coherence of qubits lasts only for microseconds. Today’s most entangled computer, Google’s GOOG -1.1% Bristlecone, has just 72 stable qubits. 

Nonetheless, I have been arguing for the past four years, including in this column, that Q-Day is likely to come sooner than even quantum scientists can predict, and that the time to get ready to protect our vulnerable data and networks is now.  Others prefer to procrastinate, citing other experts who say such a threat is at least a decade or more away. The fact that the National Institute of Standards and Technology won’t have its quantum-resistant algorithm standards ready until 2024, and expects the rollout to space out for another five to fifteen years, has helped to encourage complacency disguised as confidence.  ... ' 

D-Wave and Gate Model Quantum

Recall we talked to D-Wave regarding applications for Quantum computing, and now continue to follow them. Have often been mentioned here.   Here an update in Venturebeat:

D-Wave opens up to Gate-model Quantum Computing    by Jack Vaughan  @JackIVaughan

Recent advances in quantum computing show progress, but not enough to live up to years of hyperbole. An emerging view suggests the much-publicized quest for more quantum qubits and quantum supremacy may be overshadowed by a more sensible quest to make practical use of the qubits we have now.

The latter view holds particularly true at D-Wave Systems Inc., the Vancouver, B.C., Canada-based quantum computing pioneer that recently disclosed its roadmap for work on logic gate-model quantum computing systems.

Creating Business Value Using No-Code Prediction & Forecasting Technology: Data Stories from Enterprise Executives at the Forefront of AI._

D-Wave’s embrace of gates is notable. To date, the company focuses solely on quantum annealing processors. Using this probabilistic approach, it has achieved superconducting qubit processor counts that it claims outpaces most others. Its latest Advantage system boasts 5,000 qubits. That’s well ahead of the 127-qubit device IBM reported in November.

There is an important caveat, as followers of the quantum business know. D-Wave’s annealing qubits don’t have the general quantum qualities that competitive quantum gate-model systems have, and the degree of processing speed-up they provide has been questioned.

Questions arise despite placing its systems in research labs at Google, NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and elsewhere. D-Wave’s qubit counts have been faulted by critics for specializing in a purpose-built approach aimed at a certain class of optimization problems.

Bring on the NISQ

Still, the company has a leg-up with its experience compared to most competitors, having fabricated and programmed superconducting parts since at least 2011.

For that matter, the gate-model quantum computing crew’s benchmarks have come under attack, too, and its battles with scaling and quantum error (or “noise”) correction have spawned the term “noisy intermediate-scale quantum” (or “NISQ”) to describe the present era, where users have to begin to do what they can with whatever working qubits they have. ... ' 

New on D-Wave Quantum

If you have followed this blog, you know that I have followed D-Wave since nearly their beginning.  They introduced me to solving combinatoric models their way.  Today found the below a report by TechCrunch on how D-Wave to further generalize their methods to build a gate model quantum computers. Similar to what is being done by IBM.  And the engineering needs for such a system. Worth understanding.  Comments? Plan to continue to follow here.

D-Wave plans to build a gate-model quantum computer  By Frederic Lardinois@frederic  in Techcrunch

For more than 20 years, D-Wave has been synonymous with quantum annealing. Its early bet on this technology allowed it to become the world’s first company to sell quantum computers, but that also somewhat limited the real-world problems its hardware could solve, given that quantum annealing works especially well for optimization problems like protein folding or route planning. But as the company announced at its Qubits conference today, a superconducting gate-model quantum computer — of the kind IBM and others currently offer — is now also on its roadmap.

D-Wave believes the combination of annealing, gate-model quantum computing and classic machines is what its businesses’ users will need to get the most value from this technology. “Like we did when we initially chose to pursue annealing, we’re looking ahead,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “We’re anticipating what our customers need to drive practical business value, and we know error-corrected gate-model quantum systems with practical application value will be required for another important part of the quantum application market: simulating quantum systems. This is an application that’s particularly useful in fields like materials science and pharmaceutical research.”

Early on, the company argues, annealing provided the fastest path to building quantum applications. Today, about 250 D-Wave customers have built applications for its hardware, which virtually all of its users access through its Leap cloud service. And since there’s clearly value in quantum annealing, too, D-Wave won’t do away with it. “Annealing remains core to our roadmap,” the company says, and it plans to continue to invest and develop its current systems. Indeed, D-Wave believes that annealing — and the optimization use cases it enables — will account for about a third of the quantum application market.

But the company is also clearly aware that this is a major change in its strategy and that it has a bit of explaining to do. For years, after all, D-Wave argued that its annealing technology might one day be able to be used for a general quantum computer, too. Now, however, the company notes that since the technology and theory behind it has matured — and D-Wave itself has learned a lot about the materials engineering challenges involved — it’s “exactly the right time from a technical and theory perspective to face the challenges of gate-model implementation head-on.”  ... ' 

On the State of Quantum

 This also talks about D-Wave, which we touched with in our early examinations.  We are getting to closer to having the ability to solve complex problems very fast, and to have to worry about Quantum making some of our security less successful.

The State of Quantum Computing   By Logan Kugler, Commissioned by CACM Staff, April 8, 2021

In December 2020, a Chinese research team claimed to have successfully achieved "quantum advantage" by using quantum computing methods to perform computations that classical supercomputers can't.

Using photons, the team carried out a calculation called a boson-sampling problem. The calculation has so many variables that existing supercomputers "would take half the age of Earth" to calculate the problem, according to Nature. The Chinese team used quantum computing to achieve the calculation in a few minutes.

"[This] is certainly an impressive academic achievement, showing that quantum machinery can in some cases strain the abilities of conventional computers," said Chris Monroe, co-founder and chief scientist of IonQ, a quantum computer maker developing what it describes as a general-purpose trapped ion quantum computer and software to generate, optimize, and execute quantum circuits. "But it's important to consider that the problem they solved is a narrow application space with no known practical use, and it will be difficult to tune their experiment for any other type of problem."

Several leading companies are working to avoid that problem by developing practical quantum machines and deploying them for real commercial applications.

D-Wave Systems is one such company at the forefront of recent quantum computing developments. British Columbia, Canada-based D-Wave makes quantum machines specifically for businesses. Last year, the company announced the general availability of Advantage, its 5,000-qubit quantum system, accompanied by its quantum cloud service, Leap. The company's machines take a unique approach to quantum computing called "quantum annealing," which uses the physics of quantum phase transitions to perform computations. The company bet big on annealing early on, a bet that it says has paid off.

Murray Thom, D-Wave's vice president of software and cloud services, said, "We believed—and still believe—that annealing is the fastest path to our number-one objective: fueling customer value through practical quantum applications." The company says over 250 quantum-powered applications built with its system are now in production from Fortune 500 companies like Volkswagen, DENSO, and Accenture.  .. ...

........ "Quantum computing technology is accelerating rapidly, with new advancements and new companies getting involved nearly daily," says IonQ CEO and President Peter Chapman. "When I joined IonQ in 2019, people said that quantum would never work. We don't hear much from those people anymore."

Logan Kugler is a freelance technology writer based in Tampa, FL, USA. He has written for over 60 major publications.

Quantum Computer Solves Simulation

Recall our previous mentions of D-Wave Quantum Methods.

A quantum computer just solved a decades-old problem three million times faster than a classical computer   

Using a method called quantum annealing, D-Wave's researchers demonstrated that a quantum computational advantage could be achieved over classical means.

By Daphne Leprince-Ringuet | February 23, 2021 -- 15:26 GMT (07:26 PST) | Topic: Quantum Computing  ZDNet

Scientists from quantum computing company D-Wave have demonstrated that, using a method called quantum annealing, they could simulate some materials up to three million times faster than it would take with corresponding classical methods. 

Together with researchers from Google, the scientists set out to measure the speed of simulation in one of D-Wave's quantum annealing processors, and found that performance increased with both simulation size and problem difficulty, to reach a million-fold speedup over what could be achieved with a classical CPU. 

The calculation that D-Wave and Google's teams tackled is a real-world problem; in fact, it has already been resolved by the 2016 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Vadim Berezinskii, J. Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless, who studied the behavior of so-called "exotic magnetism", which occurs in quantum magnetic systems.    ... " 

Free CERN Quantum Lectures and Course

Looks to be of interest, in particular includes D-Wave (who we connected with early on) and IBM implementations.  Been asked to drop in on this and comment on its executive relevance.  Would anyone else like to comment? 

What's quantum computing? CERN's new free online course offers you the answer

CERN will walk developers through implementing quantum algorithms on IBM and D-Wave quantum computers.   By Liam Tung

If you're a CIO or developer who's keen to get a handle on quantum computing, qubits, quantum algorithms and machine learning, CERN's new free online lecture series could be a good way into the subject.      

CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research, home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and birthplace of the worldwide web – is kicking off the weekly lecture series on Friday, November 6 at 10:30am CET. The talks are being held every Friday at the same time for the next seven weeks through to Friday, December 18. 

They'll focus on the practical aspects of quantum computing, such as implementing quantum algorithms in quantum simulators and quantum computers from IBM Quantum Experience and D-Wave Leap.   ... " 

D-Wave Does 5000 Quantum Qubits

Recall we talked to D-Wave early on and followed them for a long time.  see many previous posts.

D-Wave’s 5,000-qubit quantum computing platform handles 1 million variable  By Emil Protalinski  @EPro in Venturebeat

D-Wave today launched its next-generation quantum computing platform available via its Leap quantum cloud service. The company calls Advantage “the first quantum computer built for business.” In that vein, D-Wave today also debuted Launch, a jump-start program for businesses that want to begin building hybrid quantum applications.

“The Advantage quantum computer is the first quantum computer designed and developed from the ground up to support business applications,” D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told VentureBeat. “We engineered it to be able to deal with large, complex commercial applications and to be able to support the running of those applications in production environments. There is no other quantum computer anywhere in the world that can solve problems at the scale and complexity that this quantum computer can solve problems. It really is the only one that you can run real business applications on. The other quantum computers are primarily prototypes. You can do experimentation, run small proofs of concept, but none of them can support applications at the scale that we can.”  ... '

D-Wave Announces Leap-2 and Discusses it and Matching with Machine Learning

Fascinating progress here.  We have followed D-Wave Quantum computing here since our original conversations with them.  Excellent update here.

D-Wave: Quantum computing and machine learning are ‘extremely well matched’   By Emil Protalinski   @EPRO in VentureBeat

Following D-Wave’s announcement of Leap 2, a new version of its quantum cloud service for building and deploying quantum computing applications, VentureBeat had the opportunity to sit down with Murray Thom, D-Wave’s VP of software and cloud services. We naturally talked about Leap 2, including the improvements the company hopes it will bring for businesses and developers. But we also discussed the business applications D-Wave has already seen to date.

Quantum computing leverages qubits to perform computations that would be much more difficult, or simply not feasible, for a classical computer. Based in Burnaby, Canada, D-Wave was the first company to sell commercial quantum computers, which are built to use quantum annealing. Applications include everything from cryptography and optimization to machine learning and materials science. In fact, D-Wave has a webpage dedicated to quantum computing applications including airline scheduling, election modeling, quantum chemistry simulation, automotive design, preventative health care, logistics, and more.  ... "


Here is part of the press release about D-Waves's Leap 2:

D-Wave Launches Leap 2, Opening Door to In-Production Quantum Applications
The quantum cloud service gives developers and enterprises a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive environment for developing and deploying hybrid quantum applications.

BURNABY, BC – (February 26, 2020) — D-Wave Systems Inc., the leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, today announced the immediate availability of Leap 2 , the first quantum cloud service designed for developers and organizations to easily build and deploy real-world hybrid quantum applications with practical impact. In addition to live, real-time access to the D-Wave quantum system, the offering expands the Quantum Application Environment (QAE) to provide new tools and resources needed to drive development of critical business applications and put them into production.

Built on insights from thousands of users, many of them developers, and from the past 18 months of usage of the Leap quantum cloud service, Leap 2 includes:  .... " 

Quantum to Model Traffic with Simulations

Another mention of D-Wave quantum in the news.   Also the term 'Quantum-Style' is used for the first time I have seen,

Microsoft, Ford Try Using Quantum-Style Computing to Solve Seattle's Traffic Problem   By GeekWire via ACM

Microsoft and Ford Motor are using quantum-inspired computing models to try to optimize traffic management in Seattle.

Ford chief technology officer Ken Washington said timely optimization using an enormous number of possible route assignments is not feasible with traditional computers, so the partners have experimented with algorithms that simulate a quantum approach on classical systems.

The researchers tested various scenarios, including one involving about 5,000 vehicles concurrently requesting routes that spanned the Seattle area. Washington said the algorithms sent balanced routing suggestions to the vehicles in 20 seconds, improving congestion by 73% versus "selfish" routing, while cutting average commuting time by 8%.

Said Microsoft's Julie Love, “We don't have to wait until quantum computers are deployed on a wide scale to take advantage of the technology."  ... "

From GeekWire

 .... The results could be used to improve navigation apps, and could also be applied to optimization problems in fields ranging from robotics to aerodynamics.

Microsoft isn’t Ford’s only partner when it comes to traffic optimization: The automaker has also been working with NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Ames Research Center, where Burnaby, B.C.-based D-Wave Systems’ quantum annealing hardware comes into play. The NASA-Ford partnership focuses on using quantum-inspired algorithms to optimize energy consumption by commercial vehicle fleets.

Separately, Ford has set up a City Insights Platform to study urban mobility issues in depth. It’s all part of Ford’s drive to think of itself as a mobility company rather than strictly a car company, particularly as it closes in on fielding fully autonomous vehicles in 2021.  ... " 

Quantum Navigation?

I am skeptical that a quantum computer is necessary for this kind of shortest route navigation.  But interesting claim, and a real problem.  Will examine further.  Saw the D-Wave special kind of  annealing application of quantum computing early on.   Continue to follow

Volkswagen to Test Quantum Navigation App in Real Traffic
The Wall Street Journal
Sara Castellanos
October 31, 2019

Volkswagen will test a quantum navigation app in Portugal next week, with plans to eventually incorporate its capabilities into automobiles. Nine buses shuttling passengers between Lisbon's Web Summit conference and other metropolitan areas will have iPads loaded with the app, which features technology from Canada’s D-Wave Systems. The app employs cloud-based quantum-computing services to calculate the swiftest route for each bus in near-real time, in order to minimize traffic congestion and shorten travel times. While a predictive analytics tool on a classical computer will identify which of 26 bus stops probably have especially high rider numbers 45 minutes ahead of time, a quantum computer will map out the fastest route for each bus, accounting for millions of real-time data points about congestion and ridership demand in milliseconds. Said Scott Pankin of Los Alamos National Laboratory, “What’s exciting about this work is that it’s being applied in the real world.” 

D-Wave Still in the Race for Quantum

Have been following D-Wave's work since their inception.     We also worked with Los Alamos in the area of dealing with rare maintenance events.   See tag below.

Nuclear weapons lab buys D-Wave's next-gen quantum computer

Los Alamos National Laboratory will install D-Wave's 5,000-qubit Advantage system in 2020.

 It's been a busy time in quantum computing: IBM announced its biggest quantum computer so far, and Google reportedly has cracked a problem with its quantum computer faster than a conventional computer could. Now D-Wave, a rival with a different approach to the technology, has announced that nuclear weapons research site Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is the first customer for its next-generation machine.

Quantum computers are a totally different breed of machine than the classical computers that power everything from your smartphone to Amazon's vast e-commerce operation. Quantum computers rely on the weird physics of the very small to perform calculations classical machines  can't solve -- at least in principle. So far, the technology is very, very experimental..... " 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems:  from the Wikipedia:


" .... On May 11, 2011, D-Wave Systems announced D-Wave One, described as "the world's first commercially available quantum computer", operating on a 128-qubit chipset[10] using quantum annealing (a general method for finding the global minimum of a function by a process using quantum fluctuations)[11][12][13][14] to solve optimization problems.   ... " 

Quantum Hype and Skepticism

Short piece looks at both sides.

Quantum Hype and Quantum Skepticism   By Moshe Y. Vardi 
Communications of the ACM, May 2019, Vol. 62 No. 5, Page 7
10.1145/3322092

" .... The popular media regularly reports breathlessly on quantum computing: "Quantum computing will break your encryption in a few years"; "Why quantum's computing time is now"; and "The computer that could rule the world." Yet the physical realization of quantum computing has been a hard slog. A Canadian company, D-Wave Systems, has claimed to be the world's first company to sell computers that exploit quantum effects in their operation. But the D-Wave machine is far from being a general quantum computer, and several researchers disagree with D-Wave's claims.

In fact, several quantum-computing researchers have expressed skepticism regarding the physical realizability of the quantum-computing dream.a Quantum skeptics agree that quantum computation does offer an exponential advantage of classical computation in theory, but they argue it is not physically possible to build scalable quantum computers. Gil Kalai is one of the most prominent quantum skeptics. All physical systems are noisy, he argues,b and qubits kept in highly sensitive superpositions will inevitably be corrupted by any interaction with the outside world. In contrast, quantum-skepticism skeptics, such as Scott Aaronson, view the realizability of quantum computing as an outstanding question in physics,c and regard the skeptical view as representing an implausible revolution in physics. .... " 

Augmenting Quantum D-Wave Annealing

Mentioned before we connected with D-Wave Quantum Computing early on.   Have posted many items about their work.    Their annealing approach still has great potential for some difficult kinds of combinatorial problems.  Note how this addresses partitioning of sub problems to make the D-Wave approach most useful.  Here a new example of work from Japan in the automotive manufacturing space.  Not enough detail here, but taking a closer look.

Algorithm Optimizes Quantum Computing Problem-Solving 
Tohoku University in ACM

Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan have developed an algorithm that augments the ability of a Canadian-designed quantum computer to more efficiently determine an optimized solution for complex problems. The D-Wave quantum annealer uses the concepts of quantum physics to solve "combinatorial optimization problems;” Tohoku's Shuntaro Okada and Masayuki Ohzeki designed the algorithm with global automotive components manufacturer Denso and other collaborators, to improve this capability. The algorithm partitions a large problem into a group of subproblems, then the annealer iteratively optimizes each subproblem to solve the overarching one. The program also enhances another algorithm via the same concept, permitting the use of larger subproblems, and more efficiently arriving at optimal solutions. Ohzeki said, "As the number of [quantum bits] mounted in the D-Wave quantum annealer increases, we will be able to obtain even better solutions."  ... '

Learning Curve for Quantum Computing

Intriguing look at how and why to use quantum computing.  Somewhat technical view.    See the editors note that this did not solve the problem posed.  Also I observe that D-Wave is a specialized approach.  By my reading the reconceptualizing is the hardest part posed here.   Coding,  even as it has evolved in many decades is still a process of step by step ordered logic under the constraint of a language.

D-Wave 2000Q hands-on: Steep learning curve for quantum computing 
Reconceptualizing a problem is the hard part, but the end is rewarding.   By Chris Lee

Editor's note: I realize that I do not correctly calculate the Bragg transmission in either the classical or the quantum case, however, it is close enough to get an idea of the differences between programming a classical and a quantum computer. ... "

D-Wave Announces Next Gen of Its Unique Quantum Computing

Continue to follow this.  Notably for its possible use for certain kinds of problems.

D-Wave announces its next-gen quantum computing platform  By Frederic Lardinois in TechCrunch

D-Wave, the well-funded quantum computing company, today announced its next-gen quantum computing platform with 5,000 qubits, up from 2,000 in the company’s current system. The new platform will come to market in mid-2020.

The company’s new so-called Pegasus topology connects every qubit to 15 other qubits, up from six in its current topology. With this, developers can use the machine to solve larger problems with fewer physical qubits — or larger problems in general.

It’s worth noting that D-Wave’s qubits are different from those of the company’s competitors like Rigetti, IBM  and Google, with shorter coherence times and a system that mostly focuses on solving optimization problems. To do that, D-Wave produces lots of qubits, but in a relatively high-noise environment. That means that you can’t compare D-Wave’s qubit count to that of its competitors (with D-Wave claiming the superiority of its machine for certain problems), which are building universal quantum computers.  .... " 

VW Uses D-Wave for Quantum Chemistry

VW Solves Quantum Chemistry Problems on a D-Wave Machine 

IEEE Spectrum   By Mark Anderson

VW Solves Quantum Chemistry Problems on a D-Wave Machine

Scientists say their work offers a proof of principle for using D-Wave’s quantum computers to tackle even tougher chemistry problems  .... 

 " ... D-Wave computers are known as “quantum annealers,” running complex circuits using the machine’s 128,000 superconducting Josephson junctions. The integrated superconducting circuit, cooled down to thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, contains 2,048 quantum bits (qubits) and 6,016 interconnections (a.k.a. couplers) between qubits. It is called an annealer because the circuit begins in one state and then slowly transitions through to its final state, with its individual qubits representing distillations of an answer. ... "

Researchers at Volkswagen in Germany and the U.S. have used a D-Wave 2000Q quantum computer to solve rudimentary quantum chemistry problems. The researchers ran D-Wave computations that identified the ground-state energies of molecular hydrogen and lithium hydride. Although both molecules are well known and well studied, the Volkswagen researchers established an increasingly computational route to exploring chemistry in the quantum realm. The researchers also enumerated a list of quantum chemistry simulation goals that sufficiently robust quantum computation should address, such as: designing next-generation batteries; optimizing solar cells via detailed study of photosynthesis, and faithfully simulating complex molecules without restoring to approximations that conventional computers use to make such simulations tractable.  .... "