Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology reported that the D-Wave Two computer made by D-Wave Systems iss not faster than traditional PCs, as its creators claimed it to be.
Matthias Troyer, lead author of the study and a professor from the Institute for Theoretical Physics, concluded that there was insufficient evidence supporting the company's claim that the quantum computer could perform faster than any other traditional computers.
The D-Wave computer, unlike others of its kind, uses quantum technology to carry out commands. Traditional computers, in comparison, perform by executing binary tasks. Most traditional computers also use mathematical computations to process data in the forms of 1 and 0. Quantum computers use quantum bits that take the form of 1 and 0 simultaneously.
Google also recently commented on this issue in a blog post.
"While this is an interesting baseline, these competitors are general-purpose solvers. You can create much tougher classical competition by writing highly optimized code that accounts for the sparse connectivity structure of the current D-Wave chip," the tech giant stated.
D-Wave Systems was not pleased with the results of the research. Co-founder Geordie Rose explained to Wired that the computer possesses the best algorithm there is, and it also has the fastest processors that exist today.
The researchers compared the performance of the D-Wave Two and a Cray supercomputer that was optimized to perform quickly and efficiently using an Intel processor. The experiment discovered that the quantum computer could work 35,000 times faster than the desktop computer, but upon executing certain commands, it might also run 100 times slower.
"Basically, the paper being released in Science looks at a narrow set of benchmarking problems that aren't expected to show an advantage for quantum annealing," a D-Wave spokesperson told CNET.
Further results of the study were published in the June 20 issue of Science.
