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<p>FWIW, my nephew is in the middle of his PhD in Materials Science
in the UofA working on their Phononic Quantum Computing
program. I can't suss out how fast it is moving... he only sees
the project through the tiny sliver of his own contribution, but
it *seems* to promise much larger PhiBit (Phononic QBit) counts at
room temperature, etc. Some of the underlying engineering is
quite fascinating (e.g. modulating the speed of sound in glass
rods using coherent light to simulate an exponential "horn").</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://mse.engineering.arizona.edu/news-events/mse-researcher-uses-phononics-build-quantum-computers">https://mse.engineering.arizona.edu/news-events/mse-researcher-uses-phononics-build-quantum-computers</a></p>
<p>I've been trying to wrap my head around the implications of AQC
for the kinds of problems I've been using 3D graph layout to try
to develop intuition on. The goal is *rarely* to truly minimize
the energy of the system (modeled as a graph with *vectors* of
edge-weights rather than simple scalars) to explore the
trade-space of the systems being modeled. In the problem-domain
of interest, the challenge is not to find "the answer" but rather
to explore the implied landscape of high-dimensional problems. <br>
</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/27/19 9:00 AM, Marcus Daniels
wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Jochen writes:<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">“How do you program a AQC quantum
computer? Somehow it must be setup to execute a certain type
of calculation?”<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">An AQC program can be thought of as a
graph where the nodes have a value that represents a linear
bias up or down for qubit spins in the problem. Values on
edges in the graph represent the tendency of the spins to
attract or repel one another. (The graph is sent to the
annealer as a matrix.) The output is a vector of spins
that have a Boltzmann-like distribution given the relative
magnitude of the coefficients in the graph to the finite
temperature of the machine. You can find examples on the
web of factoring / inverting calculations, social network
algorithms, vehicle routing, and a range of other
applications. There are theory papers (Aharonov 2004)
that demonstrate that AQC is equivalent to the gate model.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">“ And what do you think about photonic
quantum computers? The Canadian company Xanadu from Toronto
tries to go in this direction. <o:p></o:p></p>
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<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.xanadu.ai/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.xanadu.ai/</a> “<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Another well-known one is IonQ. One of
their founders gave a public lecture in Santa Fe a few
months ago. These are intriguing systems, but they aren’t
big enough yet to do meaningful calculations. Honeywell is
getting into that area too. And there are some smaller
start-ups like Atom Computer.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Marcus<o:p></o:p></p>
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