Sci Am coverage on the quantum computer

Scientific American online has coverage on the D-Wave announcement this week, which I point to here because their coverage is critical and ordinarily reliable, which separates it from most of the hype that’s been printed and re-printed this week.

Reality check: Lloyd says that a quantum computer would probably need thousands of qubits to solve puzzles that today’s computers cannot. The big question, he says, is whether the adiabatic method’s gradual adjustment of qubits would operate rapidly at that size. Researchers are skeptical of adiabatic quantum computers because “it sounds too good to be true,” Lloyd says. “It’s not yet known whether they work or not, so really it actually makes sense to go and build some and see what happens.”