Canadian company lays claim to first quantum computer

BBC : D-Wave , a company located in Burnaby, British Columbia, builds computers that purportedly rely on quantum bits, or qubits, of information rather than the binary bits used by traditional computing systems. Whereas binary bits exist in one of two states, qubits exist in a superposition of both states at the same time. Whether D-Wave’s computer is truly a quantum computer is in dispute. But in a recent study published in Physical Review X, researchers explain how they used one of the qubits in D-Wave’s processor to gain information on the others. From that, they were able to determine the level of entanglement among the qubits, which is a defining characteristic of quantum systems. They found that a number of qubits were not only entangled but also working together. However, because the study only showed entanglement of 8 qubits in a 512-qubit system, critics say it proves entanglement only at a local level and not on the larger scale needed by a true quantum computer.