D-wave quantum computing "it feels like the altar of an extraterrestrial god"

D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a quantum computing company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. D-Wave is the first company in the world to sell quantum computers.

The D-Wave One was built on early prototypes such as D-Wave's Orion Quantum Computer. The prototype was a 16-qubit quantum annealing processor, demonstrated on February 13, 2007 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit quantum annealing processor on November 12, 2007. The chip was fabricated at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Microdevices Lab in Pasadena, California.

The underlying ideas for the D-Wave approach arose from experimental results in condensed matter physics, and in particular work on quantum annealing in magnets performed by Dr. Gabriel Aeppli. These ideas were later recast in the language of quantum computation by MIT physicists Ed Farhi, Seth Lloyd, Terry Orlando and Bill Kaminsky, whose publications in 2000 and 2004 provided both a theoretical model for quantum computation that fit with the earlier work in quantum magnetism (specifically the adiabatic quantum computing model and quantum annealing, its finite temperature variant), and a specific enablement of that idea using superconducting flux qubits which is a close cousin to the designs D-Wave produced. In order to understand the origins of much of the controversy around the D-Wave approach, it is important to note that the origins of the D-Wave approach to quantum computation arose not from the conventional quantum information field, but from experimental condensed matter physics.