Aerospace defense contractor Lockheed Martin just entered into a “multi-year contract” with D-Wave Systems, Inc. to purchase the world’s first commercially available quantum computer. Here’s a blurb from the official press release:
Lockheed Martin and D-Wave will collaborate to realize the benefits of a computing platform based upon a quantum annealing processor, as applied to some of Lockheed Martin’s most challenging computation problems. The multi-year contract includes a system, maintenance and associated professional services.
This is both fascinating and terrifying news. Imagine what could be done with this hardware.
That’s nothing super-special really. Quantum computers just solve a very specific type of problem faster than regular processors. The ones this company is selling aren’t even general purpose; all they can do is basically pick the best number from a set of numbers, a technique called optimization.
But this isn’t a TRUE quantum computer, right?
You’d have to define “true quantum computer”. It is actually doing the whole quantum entaglement thing, if the company’s literature is to be believed.