Dr. Steve Reinhardt presented at the Minnesota Quantum Computing meetup on August 14, 2019. His talk focused on annealing quantum computation, which is used by the D-Wave computer. This model of quantum computation has not received as much attention as the quantum gate model, but Steve argued persuasively that it may be the first to deliver superior performance on real problems. While quantum computers are still several years away, we need to start developing the software before the hardware is ready. He described the roadmap to quantum computing, and how his company is developing a software stack that delivers high performance on current hardware, but is "quantum ready" in the sense that it will be able to exploit quantum processors when they become available.
