Lockheed Martin's New Quantum Computer Doesn't Really Quantum Compute

D-Wave has a boy-who-cried-wolf problem. Some six years ago, the Canadian future-computer company announced a major technological breakthrough, a world-changing feat, a spectacular accomplishment. After researchers tried for decades, D-Wave unveiled the "world's first commercial quantum computer," the Orion system, at the Computer History Museum in 2007. More importantly, the firm said it would have a beefed up commercial version within a year.

The technology would be able to solve problems millions of times faster than today's conventional computers, a level of processing power that would potentially make some earth-shattering breakthroughs possible. There's only one problem: It wasn't exactly a quantum computer.

At least, critics didn't think so. "D-Wave is misleading the public by calling their device ‘a practical quantum computer,'" Umesh Vazirani, one of the founders of quantum complexity theory, told the press. "The whole point of quantum computing is achieving a large speedup over classical computers, something that D-Wave hasn’t accomplished."

Vazirani added that even if the Orion system did have quantum capabilities, it "would likely not be more powerful than a cell phone." D-Wave later withdrew its claim that it would build a practical quantum computer within a year.

D-Wave's made a lot of progress since 2007. A few days ago, the company hit another milestone, when Lockheed Martin  to commercial scale. It took six years, rather than the one D-Wave initially promised, but it's a big breakthrough in the business of quantum computing. This also makes Lockheed Martin the first in the world to use a quantum computer for business purposes.

Pretty cool, right? Building next generation technology and solving hard problems by manipulating atoms in a quantum state sounds cool anyway. However, that tricky problem from 2007 has proved elusive. While scientists have been able to build simple quantum computers that perform calculations at about the same rate as a conventional computer, experts insist that a real super-powerful practical quantum computer is closer than ever but still years away.

The principle behind quantum computing is a little bit confusing. In noob-friendly terms, quantum computers are basically ultra-powerful computers that rely on the rules of quantum physics to process data rather than a network of transistors that today's binary computers use. So instead of using bits, which can transmit information in only ones and zeros, a quantum computer uses quantum bits, also known as qubits, which aren't limited to two states.

A qubit can be read as a one or a zero or both, including all points in between. This means that a quantum computer can perform a number of calculations at once, unlike a conventional computer, which is limited to performing one calculation at a time. Still confused? Watch this cheesy slash kinda creepy video by futurist Christopher Barnatt:

Critics maintain that D-Wave's (very expensive) computers don't exactly do the kind of quantum computing that physicists have been dreaming about. They say that D-Waves multi-million dollar machines are just clunkier, more expensive versions of conventional supercomputers. However, D-Wave's won a little bit of confidence last August when it published details of its quantum computing process in Nature.

Despite its best efforts, D-Wave progress inevitably lives in the shadow of the skepticism from that 2007 demonstration. The company cried wolf, but nobody else saw the wolf. It's kind of a bummer really. A commercial quantum computer would not only be a major breakthrough in the world of computing, but also that of quantum physics.

But hey, you can't totally blame D-Wave for propping up its claims, though. It's a for-profit company, after all. Labeling its computers as quantum computers is a geekier version of Vitamin Water calling its beverage nutritious. It's sort of true, but not really, and once D-Wave commercial model comes out, we'll see if the market buys into the claim.