In February, D-Wave Systems ofVancouver, British Columbia, launched the Orion, what they call “the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer.” Whereas digital computers confine bits of information to either 1 or 0, quantum computers harness the strange laws of quantum physics to achieve “qubits” of information. Unlike bits, qubits can represent more than one number at a time. Computer scientists realized decades ago that representing multiple values simultaneously could cut certain number-crunchingproblems from years to minutes. But no one had ever managed to assemble more than a handful of qubits at a time.
D-Wave claims to have solved that problem. It cools circuits made of the rare metal niobium to five-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Each of these 16 superconducting circuits serves as a qubit, and the company has plans for expansion. By the end of next year, it hopes to unveil a vastly more powerful 1,000-qubit machine. ...
