You might recall that Shin, Smith, Smolin, and Vazirani posted a widely-discussed preprint a week ago, questioning the evidence for large-scale quantum behavior in the D-Wave machine.
Geordie Rose responded here. Without further ado:. Even a cursory reading of our paper will reveal that Geordie Rose is attacking a straw man. To date the Boixo et al paper was the only serious evidence in favor of large scale quantum behavior by the D-Wave machine.
We investigated their claims and showed that there are serious problems with their conclusions. Their conclusions were based on the close agreement between the input-output data from D-Wave and quantum simulated annealing, and their inability despite considerable effort to find any classical model that agreed with the input-output data.
In our paper, we gave a very simple classical model of interacting magnets that closely agreed with the input-output data. The task of finding an accurate model for the D-Wave machine classical, quantum or otherwise , would be better pursued with direct access, not only to programming the D-Wave machine, but also to its actual hardware.
Rose goes on to point to a large number of experiments conducted by D-Wave to prove small scale entanglement over qubits and criticizes our paper for not trying to model those aspects of D-Wave.
