D-Wave has joined the ranks of quantum computer developers who have claimed to have achieved so-called “quantum supremacy,” a term used to describe the ability of a quantum system to solve problems that would take a traditional computer millions of years to compute. The achievement could lead to practical quantum systems.
Image source: D-Wave
The Palo Alto-based company published a paper in the journal Science describing how its quantum system simulated new magnetic materials, a task it says today’s classical computers can’t handle. Such materials are used in sensors, smartphones, motors, and medical imaging devices.
«“In some ways, this is the Holy Grail of quantum computing,” said Alan Baratz, chief executive of D-Wave. “This is what everyone in the industry has been working toward, and we’re the first to actually demonstrate it.”
The quantum computer simulated the new material with a complex magnetic field in less than 20 minutes, according to Andrew King, a senior research scientist at D-Wave. It would take Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s leading supercomputer about a million years to achieve the same level of detail.
The company said the demonstration was the first time a quantum computer had been used to solve problems with practical applications. The ability to simulate new magnetic materials widely used in industry means their properties can be studied before they are put into production, Baratz said.
D-Wave’s approach is markedly different from that of other quantum computer developers. Rather than trying to build a general-purpose quantum computer that can solve almost any problem, D-Wave has taken a more specialized approach called quantum annealing. This technology is best suited for solving complex optimization problems, as well as some types of material modeling.
Despite its narrower scope of application, this technology remains in demand in business. For example, a quantum system copes well with the “traveling salesman problem” — finding the optimal route between a large number of different points.
The experiment involved a prototype of the Advantage2 quantum computer, which has more than 1,200 qubits and more than 10,000 couplers and is available to D-Wave customers through the Leap quantum cloud service in real time. This prototype is significantly faster than previous-generation Advantage systems and allows for better solutions to large and complex problems, the manufacturer notes. Moreover, D-Wave currently has an Advantage2 processor that is four times more powerful than the prototype used in the experiment.
D-Wave is not the first company to claim quantum supremacy (though it uses the term “quantum advantage” to mean the same thing). Google was the first to announce it back in 2019, but their claim was soon debunked by Chinese researchers who showed that a traditional supercomputer could be programmed to perform the same task in much less time than Google claimed.
It’s worth noting that quantum computers have recently “come back into fashion.” Google and Amazon recently announced their own quantum chips, and Microsoft said in February that it had created a quantum processor using particles that scientists have not yet discovered. These developments, according to the company, will help make quantum computers more powerful.
D-Wave says its machines have been commercially useful for years, though the company has struggled to build a business at scale. It sold its first three quantum computers 14 years ago, including one to a consortium that included Google and NASA, and then moved to selling access to its technology through the cloud. In the first nine months of 2024, the company had just $6.5 million in revenue and lost $57 million. Still, D-Wave says the quarter-century it took to achieve quantum supremacy is a reasonable time frame compared with the decades it took traditional computers to commercialize after the invention of the transistor.