[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] Postdoc ad: quantum-computing programming languages

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk]

Hello.

Le 31/03/2016 22:04, Scott Pakin a écrit :
> My institution just bought a D-Wave 2X adiabatic quantum computer.
> The problem is, no one really has a grasp on how to *program* an
> adiabatic quantum computer.  It's a totally different beast from the
> gate-model quantum computers that most people imply when they talk
> about quantum computing.
I find all this a bit disturbing...
Los Alamos buys an expensive device that nobody knows how to use??

Moreover, in circumstances where the doubts about the real performance 
of the D-Wave computer stii persist?

Several physicists refuse to call this contraption a "quantum 
computer".  The statements about their "qubits" in their public 
materials are not always serious, there is practically nothing about a 
genuine state superposition, no educated physicist will buy such 
pseudo-definition as "having simultaneously the values 0 and 1" (being 
the result of two currents flowing in opposite directions ; what about 
phase?).

Their "white paper" about the map colouring shows a model which is more 
similar to a Hopfield (or similar) neural network, rather than a quantum 
computing device. The optimization is a natural application domain of 
such networks, but where are some more universal examples?

Surely, there are quantum elements in it: superconducting niobium rings, 
Josephson junctions, etc. But, actually, even a plain transistor is a 
quantum device as well, and nobody dares to call it a "qubit". Their 
native code seems to be extremely far from quantum theory, as we know it.

=
But, if the device works, has some affinities with neural stuff and with 
Monte-Carlo techniques (annealing), perhaps a good playground for 
testing it would be a Go player?

Jerzy Karczmarczuk