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Everything I’ve read says that the d-wave isn’t a real quantum computer.


This is basically correct.

When people talk about "Quantum Computers" that can factor large primes, they are referring to a Universal Gate Quantum Computer. As of today, the largest Universal Gate Quantum Computer has 72 qubits.

The DWave Quantum Annealers are essentially a special purpose device that performs Quantum Annealing. What they refer to as 'Qubits' are very different from the entangled Qubits of a Universal Quantum Computer. To the best of my knowledge (and the paper explicitly distinguishes between the two types), it has yet to be demonstrated that Quantum Annealing is equivalent to Universal Gate Quantum Computer (and is generally suspected not to be), is in it's own complexity class, or even if it provides any complexity speedup over classical computers.


There isn’t a universal quantum computer in the sense that there is a universal Turing machine for classical computation. All quantum computers are special purpose circuits, not general logic machines.




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