D-Wave Just Open-Sourced Quantum Computing by Dom Galeon.
D-Wave has just released a welcome distraction for CS types sitting in the DC Beltway Parking Lot on January 20-21, 2017. (I assuming you brought extra batteries for your laptop.) After you run out of gas, your laptop will be running on battery power alone.
Just remember to grab a copy of Qbsolv before you leave for the tailgate/parking lot party on the Beltway.
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A software tool known as Qbsolv allows developers to program D-Wave’s quantum computers even without knowledge of quantum computing. It has already made it possible for D-Wave to work with a bunch of partners, but the company wants more. “D-Wave is driving the hardware forward,” Bo Ewald, president of D-Wave International, told Wired. “But we need more smart people thinking about applications, and another set thinking about software tools.”
To that end, D-Wave has open-sourced Qbsolv, making it possible for anyone to freely share and modify the software. D-Wave hopes to build an open source community of sorts for quantum computing. Of course, to actually run this software, you’d need access to a piece of hardware that uses quantum particles, like one of D-Wave’s quantum computers. However, for the many who don’t have that access, the company is making it possible to download a D-Wave simulator that can be used to test Qbsolv on other types of computers.
This open-source Qbsolv joins an already-existing free software tool called Qmasm, which was developed by one of Qbsolv’s first users, Scott Pakin of Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Not everyone in the computer science community realizes the potential impact of quantum computing,” said mathematician Fred Glover, who’s been working with Qbsolv. “Qbsolv offers a tool that can make this impact graphically visible, by getting researchers and practitioners involved in charting the future directions of quantum computing developments.”
D-Wave’s machines might still be limited to solving optimization problems, but it’s a good place to start with quantum computers. Together with D-Wave, IBM has managed to develop its own working quantum computer in 2000, while Google teamed up with NASA to make their own. Eventually, we’ll have a quantum computer that’s capable of performing all kinds of advanced computing problems, and now you can help make that happen.
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From the github page:
qbsolv is a metaheuristic or partitioning solver that solves a potentially large quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem by splitting it into pieces that are solved either on a D-Wave system or via a classical tabu solver.
The phrase, “…might still be limited to solving optimization problems…” isn’t as limiting as it might appear.
A recent (2014) survey of quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), The Unconstrained Binary Quadratic Programming Problem: A Survey runs some thirty-three pages and should keep you occupied however long you sit on the DC Beltway.
From page 10 of the survey:
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Kochenberger, Glover, Alidaee, and Wang (2005) examine the use of UBQP as a tool for clustering microarray data into groups with high degrees of similarity.
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Where I read one person’s “similarity” to be another person’s test of “subject identity.”
PS: Enjoy the DC Beltway. You may never see it motionless ever again.