On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 4:46 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> as I understand the problems its solve quickly, they are like Ising and > satisfiability problems - they are essentially minimization over a set of > binary choices. > No, those are exactly the sort of problems that D-Wave didn't solve very fast, at least not much faster than a regular computer. I don't think protein folding can be put in that form because the folds can > be at different angles, not just fold/not-fold. > QUBO problems like protein folding are not binary stuff but about the minimization of quadratic polynomials with real number variables; its about finding the minimum energy state of a system, and the minimum energy state of a linear string of amino acids is the shape of the resulting protein . > Yes, I'm aware that protein folding is the holy grail of quantum > computing - along with breaking everybody's security codes. > I don't think D-Wave would be very good at factoring numbers, but that's OK protein folding is vastly, astronomically, more important. > That's another thing that makes me suspicious. It's something you hear > from inventors of perpetual motion machines: We can't explain exactly how > it works, we just know that it does. But the evidence that the D-Wave people can actually do what they claim is much much better than the evidence the perpetual motion people can do what they claim; although I admit that's not saying a lot. But unless Lockheed and Google and NASA have all been flimflammed I think there is really something to this. > It works on some problems, but whether it works better than a special > purpose computer designed for that class of problems is still doubtful. > If you know of anything, special purpose or otherwise, that can solve QUBO problems as fast as D-Wave can I'd like to hear about it. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
