Touche, I have met my match at hairsplitting.

No, that’s just the credit for the illustration in the article. The author’s name is not given.

As for my “contentious” definition of “commercially viable:” I work every day with the product marketing folks of both my own employer, and our actual and potential technology partners, which range from some of the largest and best established tech companies in the world, to some of the smallest and most precariously situated. In every instance I can document, those folks were working extremely hard to make sure that their products were commercially viable in the sense I gave. I can’t say that there are no scoundrels in the world who misuse the notion (The D-Wave announcement argues strongly otherwise), but I don’t think there is anything ambiguous about the phrase “commercially viable” in the technology or marketing community at large.

D-wave quickly took there science team link off in may of thier site and never replaced it (ive been following it rather rabidly hoping for updates). The only reason such an exodus would occur is:

A) There was no interesting physics left and the hybrid superconducting Q.C was theoretically complete, implying only technical barriers remain. (hopefully true. it would be so cool if this is true)
B) The machine was doomed to failure and the people who actually understand the physics bailed before it tanked. (hopefully not true)
C) The company is just a VC strategic umbrella to hedge bet large sums of money against the possibility of success versus the all too common practice of the principle stakeholders taking their low strike price options and excercising them with the inside knowledge that B) is true. (very likely the truth)

Anyways, we all hope that dwave actually makes history and validates their system by submitting to peer review and kicking all of our skeptical butts. However, the excuse of ‘keeping our findings to ourselves’ because they are a for profit company doesn’t really seem rational to me. Do they not protect everything they build with iron clad patents and a team of high priced, visciously protective lawyers? If so, without any real competitors on the horizon, wouldn’t they want to submit to us their results and show us they have made history? As S.Lloyd said, the proof is in the eating of the pudding. The CTO of d-wave is behaving irrationally by posting here and defending his machine. Why not just validate it instead, by making demonstrations of comparitive, observable speed-up (the only point unless you just love science) or even that coherent quantum effects are being harnessed? (which is enough for me!)

apologies if I have made ignorant assumptions; I am not a true lifelong expert in the field. However if i was an investor, I would steer very clear of investment or even association with d-wave until the machine is scaled properly, and produces the aforementioned speed up with coherent quantum effects cleary proven at a feasibly useful scale for solving some currently intractable problems.

I would say that the meaning of “qubit” as about as precise as “commercially viable”. What you really mean is that “qubit” has a much more arcane meaning. The rigorous meaning of “commercially viable” is of course important to any good businessman, so that they do not have the excuse that it’s okay to pantomime to the ignorant.

In other words, you can’t claim a commercially viable product until after the fact, because it’s the buyers who vote on whether you’re viable, not your marketing department.

Furthermore, D-Wave essentially claims to have solved the class of NP-Complete problems, even though they clearly know that they have not in any meaningful sense done so. (A lawyer might argue that they don’t really make that claim, but that’s how it reads. I know this because a couple of my colleagues “impeached” a short tutorial I gave on Quantum Computing earlier this week by bringing me the press release with the remark “Didn’t you say that QC cannot solve problems in the class NP in P time? These guys think otherwise.”) Rose’s response in this column that their claim is comparable to ILOG’s (disclaimer, and claim to competence: I work for ILOG) about their optimization products is baloney. Here’s the headline claim for ILOG’s CPlex product: “[ILOG’s] mathematical optimization technology enables better decision-making for efficient resource utilization.” That’s about as racy as it gets.

There’s good reason for this. We’re a publicly held company, and we can be held to account by investors for claims we make that we can’t back up. If D-Wave were a public company, and made the claims in an investment prospectus that they make on their website, they’d all be at risk of jail time.