D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a quantum computing company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. D-Wave is the first company in the world to sell quantum computers.
The D-Wave One was built on early prototypes such as D-Wave’s Orion Quantum Computer. The prototype was a 16-qubit quantum annealing processor, demonstrated on February 13, 2007 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit quantum annealing processor on November 12, 2007. In order to understand the origins of much of the controversy around the D-Wave approach, it is important to note that the origins of the D-Wave approach to quantum computation arose not from the conventional quantum information field, but from experimental condensed matter physics.
On May 11, 2011, D-Wave Systems announced D-Wave One, described as “the world’s first commercially available quantum computer”, operating on a 128-qubit chipset using quantum annealing (a general method for finding the global minimum of a function by a process using quantum fluctuations) to solve optimization problems. In May 2013, a collaboration between NASA, Google and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab based on the D-Wave Two 512-qubit quantum computer that would be used for research into machine learning, among other fields of study. (more…)