Lockheed Martin’s purchase of a $10 million computer from D-Wave Systems is making headlines (see Technology Review and Nature News). This marks the first commercial deployment of a quantum computer.
That is, if it actually is a quantum computer. A majority of quantum computing researchers are skeptical of D-Wave Systems’ claims, largely because the company has revealed very little about its technology. The company’s researchers published a paper in Nature last month that shines a little light inside the black box. Here’s hoping there’s more to come.
Separately, another Nature paper shows that quantum mechanics might be able to improve conventional computers. The paper’s principal author, writing in Scientific American, explained that it comes down to negative entropy. It’s all about having the energy used to fetch data from memory cool a computer rather than heat it.
And a feature article in Nature News looks at a way that environmental noise — normally an enemy of quantum processes — could be used to make quantum computers more stable. This idea has been kicking around for a while. Researchers came up with a similar approach nearly a decade ago (see TRN story).