We’re going to have something new today at rose.blog — our first
ever guest post, by Dr. Suzanne Gildert, who is the author of
the wonderful Physics and Cake blog. This post is a high level
overview of the Investigating the Performance of an Adiabatic
Quantum Optimization Processor paper. Suz is now an official
contributor on rose.blog, so expect more insightful commentary
here than usual from now on! How do you measure the speed of an
adiabatic quantum computer? This is a tricky question to answer,
but this paper gives it a shot. The paper focuses on a special
kind of quantum algorithm, known as Adiabatic Quantum
Optimization (AQO), which runs on a microprocessor built by
D-Wave, and I’m going to try and give a high level overview of
the main messages in this paper. The microprocessor itself has
been built and tested using a superconducting electronics
technology, but this paper concentrates on SIMULATING what it is
expected to do. I’ll explain why, and what the results tell us
about the promise of these pro