MilestoneQuantum advantageDisputed
D-Wave claims its annealer beat a supercomputer on a materials simulation
Mar 12, 2025
D-Wave and collaborators report in Science that a prototype of its Advantage2 quantum annealer simulated the behaviour of magnetic materials in minutes, a task they estimate would take the Frontier supercomputer nearly a million years. D-Wave called it quantum supremacy on a useful problem.
Why it matters
Unlike random-sampling benchmarks, the claim concerned a physics problem with possible practical value, so whether classical methods can match it matters for real applications.
Around the paper's publication, two independent teams posted classical simulations of these spin-glass dynamics that reached similar accuracy with modest resources; one (Tindall et al.) was later published in Science.
Andrew D. King · D-Wave
Related
Sources (6)
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D-Wave
Beyond Classical: D-Wave First to Demonstrate Quantum Supremacy on Useful, Real-World Problem
“Research shows D-Wave annealing quantum computer performs magnetic materials simulation in minutes that would take nearly one million years and more than the world's annual electricity consumption to solve using a classical supercomputer built with GPU clusters”
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Science
Beyond-classical computation in quantum simulation
“Beyond-classical computation in quantum simulation”
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arXiv (King et al.)
Beyond-classical computation in quantum simulation
“We show that several leading approximate methods based on tensor networks and neural networks cannot achieve the same accuracy as the quantum annealer within a reasonable time frame.”
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The Quantum Insider
D-Wave Stakes Claim on Quantum Supremacy For Real-World Problem
“D-Wave Quantum Inc. announced a peer-reviewed study in Science demonstrating that its annealing quantum computer outperformed the Frontier supercomputer in solving complex magnetic materials simulations.”
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arXiv (Tindall, Mello, Fishman, Stoudenmire and Sels)
Dynamics of disordered quantum systems with two- and three-dimensional tensor networks
“Here, we simulate these spin glass models with lattice-specific tensor networks, using belief propagation (BP) to keep up with the entanglement generated during the time evolution and then extracting expectation values with more sophisticated variants of BP. We find that state-of-the-art accuracies can be achieved with modest computational resources.”
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arXiv (Mauron and Carleo)
Challenging the Quantum Advantage Frontier with Large-Scale Classical Simulations of Annealing Dynamics
“Here, we demonstrate that time-dependent variational Monte Carlo (t-VMC) with a physically motivated Jastrow-Feenberg wave function can efficiently simulate the quantum annealing of spin glasses up to system sizes previously thought to be intractable.”
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