Los Alamos orders D-Wave’s quantum computer

Verge : On Wednesday, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) announced that it has ordered the same model of D-Wave’s quantum computer already purchased by Google and NASA’s Quantum AI Lab. Although it is not clear what LANL will use the computer for, it will likely study the machine to better understand how the D-Wave computer works and to find the most appropriate applications. Mark Anderson of LANL’s weapons physics directorate said that the lab is interested in evaluating new technologies to determine their usefulness in the lab’s activities. According to D-Wave, the computer has more than 1000 qubits of processing power and uses a technique called quantum annealing . The actual effectiveness of the computers is still under debate, and one attempt to benchmark the computer did not show any improvements over classical computing. D-Wave claims, however, that the benchmarking system used did not test the computer in a way that took advantage of its quantum functionality.