On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 4:46 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
