Initial tests found that Google and Nasa's quantum computing system was unable to outperform regular computers. But now Google has announced that its D-Wave computer has outperformed a traditional desktop by 108 times -- making it one hundred million times faster.
"What a D-Wave does in a second would take a conventional computer 10,000 years to do," said Hartmut Nevan, director of engineering at Google, during a news conference to announce the results.
The machine "raced" a conventional single-processor computer in a number of tasks, and outperformed it in every case, says Google. It has posted the results in a research paper, which is yet to be peer reviewed.
Google's interest in the D-Wave machine, which has also been invested in by Microsoft and IBM, is due to the huge power quantum computers could potentially unlock. The so called "weirdness" of quantum mechanics -- where the basic laws of physics break down -- has the potential to solve long standing problems in in machine intelligence and materials science. On Nasa's part, the computer could help schedule rocket launches or generate complex simulations of space missions.
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