Goodbye exaflop processing...hello quantum compute

Acrobat wrote:This is why all public encryption codes can be easily broken within a matter of seconds at this point by the NSA

D-Wave was originally criticized by some scientists in the quantum computing field. However, on May 16, 2013 NASA and Google, together with a consortium of universities, announced a partnership with D-Wave to investigate how D-Wave's computers could be used in the creation of artificial intelligence. Prior to announcing this partnership, NASA, Google, and Universities Space Research Association put a D-Wave computer through a series of benchmark and acceptance tests which it passed.[2] Independent researchers found that D-Wave's computers can solve some problems as much as 3,600 times faster than particular software packages running on digital computers.[2] Other independent researchers found that different software packages running on a single core of a desktop computer can solve those same problems as fast or faster than D-Wave's computers (at least 12,000 times faster for Quadratic Assignment problems, and between 1 and 50 times faster for Quadratic Unrestrained Binary Optimization problems).[32]
In 2007 Umesh Vazirani, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the founders of quantum complexity theory, made the following criticism:[33]
Their claimed speedup over classical algorithms appears to be based on a misunderstanding of a paper my colleagues van Dam, Mosca and I wrote on "The power of adiabatic quantum computing." That speed up unfortunately does not hold in the setting at hand, and therefore D-Wave's "quantum computer" even if it turns out to be a true quantum computer, and even if it can be scaled to thousands of qubits, would likely not be more powerful than a cell phone.
Wim van Dam, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, summarized the scientific community consensus as of 2008 in the journal Nature Physics:[34]
At the moment it is impossible to say if D-Wave's quantum computer is intrinsically equivalent to a classical computer or not. So until more is known about their error rates, caveat emptor is the least one can say.
An article in the May 12, 2011 edition of Nature gives details which critical academics say proves that the company's chips do have some of the quantum mechanical properties needed for quantum computing.[35][36] Prior to the 2011 Nature paper, D-Wave was criticized for lacking proof that its computer was in fact a quantum computer. Nevertheless, questions remain due to the lack of conclusive experimental proof of quantum entanglement inside D-Wave devices.[37]
MIT professor Scott Aaronson, self-described "Chief D-Wave Skeptic", originally said that D-Wave's demonstrations did not prove anything about the workings of the computer. He said that a useful quantum computer would require a huge breakthrough in physics, which has not been published or shared with the physics community.[38] Aaronson in May 2011 updated his views, announcing that he was "retiring as Chief D-wave Skeptic" in 2011,[39] and reporting his "skeptical but positive" views based on a visit to D-Wave in February 2012. Aaronson alleged one of the most important reasons for his new position on D-Wave was the aforementioned article in Nature.[37][40][41] In May 16 2013 again he resumed his skeptic post. He now criticizes D-Wave for blowing results out of proportion on press releases that claim speedups of three orders of magnitude, while at the same time a recently published paper by scientists from ETH Zurich that had access to a 128 qbit D-Wave computer outperformed it by a factor of 15 using regular digital computers and applying classical Metaheuristics (particularly simulated annealing) to the problem that D-Wave's computer is specifically designed to solve.[21]