D-Wave One Claims First Commercial Quantum Computer

The first commercially available quantum computer is here. And it's called the D-Wave One, made by Canadian computing company D-Wave. The system is equipped with a 128-qubit processor designed to perform a single mathematical operation called discrete optimization.

The D-Wave One uses quantum annealing, a mathematical operation where extreme points of a function are determined from a given set of discrete candidate solutions. Basically, with this system you can perform certain tasks such as quantum search and quantum factoring of algorithms with impossible speed.

The system can see many uses, but D-Wave is primarily targeting the field of artificial intelligence. The system would be able to handle almost any AI application, but would mainly handle just the parts that involve solving optimization problems. Any quantum computing folks here, care to shed more light on the usefulness of this new processor?

[via Forbes]