Back in 2007, the canadian firm D-Wave had claimed to have created a commercially viable quantum computer, much to the skepticism of many.. But now, in an article co-authored by D-Wave and Harvard in the latest issue of Nature's Scientific Reports , they are proving their claims all right."The D-Wave computer found the ground-state conformation of six-amino acid lattice protein models. This is the first time a quantum device has been used to tackle optimization problems related to the natural sciences," said Harvard professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik, the lead author of the paper.
Leaving the precise and complex details aside, they were basically looking for lowest energy configuration, and thus the most stable configuration of folded proteins, a normal state of biologically existing proteins.[The quantum computer correctly solved 13 times out of 10,000 for four-amino-acid and six-amino-acid sequences under the Miyazawa-Jernigan model of lattice protein folding.]
The authors are optimistically hoping "the approach employed here can be extended to treat other problems in biophysics and statistical mechanics such as molecular recognition, protein design, and sequence alignment." And Google has adopted the system to train image recognition software.
D wave has been working on 512 qubit computers since 2011, but for the experiment 128 qubit ones were used, which aint fast as even some of the high end desktops currently available, but what's interesting is that the 512 qubit one is 1000 times faster than 128 qubit, and the projected 2048 ones are another 1000 times faster than 512 ones, as stated in an interview with NextBigFuture!! So that IS some speed to await for all right!!
:D
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