Check out the following news item that I found in a popular Vancouver, Canada newspaper (the “Vancouver Foodie Jerk”)
D-Wave Secret Plans Manual Found at a StarBucks by Innocent Barista
Yesterday, a Starbucks barista who wishes to remain anonymous found at his store a curious document entitled: “D-Wave Secret Plans Manual” which was apparently left behind inadvertently by a store customer. D-Wave is a maker of quantum computers. The barista thought the document was a trade secret, maybe as valuable as a prototype of the next iPhone (or Blackberry? nah). He promptly notified one of our journalists thinking that we would pay him beaucoup d’argent for it, but we said “no can do pal”. We called D-Wave, and the company’s CEO, Geordie Rose, admitted that the document belonged to him. He said that the document was just a joke, but that he would sue the pants off of us if we didn’t return it to him immediately. Here are the first two pages of the document, We can’t make heads or tails out of it. Something about a quantum SPECTRE. It’s something first hypothesized by Einstein, I believe.
| D-Wave targets (8 tentacles) |
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| (1) NASA (the pork) |
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| (2) DARPA and its Defense Companies (the revolving door, pork++) |
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| (3) 100+ Patents (trolling) |
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| (4) Universities (Institutions of Lower Learning) |
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| (5) Bought Politicians |
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| (6) Evil Investment Bankers |
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| (7) Greedy Investors (the dumb money) |
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| (8) Silicon Valley (reality distortion field) |
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Quantum Bayesian Networks 
I was worried there for a moment that I’d actually left the real Secret Plans document at Starbucks.
Comment by Geordie — August 7, 2013 @ 12:49 am
Ha ha ha ha ha! There was a writer, I think it was Thomas Disch who told us once that “laughter is just a slowed down terror scream”. Where there is no way to tell a rabbit hole from a shithole any more…
Comment by Elangel Exterminador — August 7, 2013 @ 9:50 pm
Dear El Ángel Exterminador (a handle which, for those who don’t know it, refers to a famous Luis Buñuel movie), thanks for the moral support.
Comment by rrtucci — August 7, 2013 @ 11:14 pm
Know your D-wavers:
A Google search on Eric Ladizinsky yielded the following video in which Ladizinsky narrates his life story. How he started at TRW, where he was a humble squid man, not yet a D-wave surfing dude. After winning a $10 million grant from DARPA to do a quantum computing project (bringing 0 years of quantum computing experience to the table but also having the backing of TRW which is another name for DARPA), he met Geordie Rose who had $20 million from Jurvetson but was floundering badly after 5 years of banging his head against the wall of Academic inertia. When Geordie met Eric, they clicked together very well as they brought different strengths to the table. A very interesting video if you want to learn some of the strengths (and weaknesses) of Eric Ladizinsky and of D-Wave as a whole.
Comment by rrtucci — August 7, 2013 @ 11:36 pm
Know your D-Wavers:
A search on Bo Ewald yielded the following posts:
Neil Johnson Says:
Comment #53 May 16th, 2013 at 9:11 pm
I am not enough of an expert on QC to enter the debate on the technical merits of the D-Wave machine, but I was amused to see Bo Ewald (Civil Engineering major) named to run another tech company. After he became CEO at Cray it nearly failed. After later becoming CEO at SGI it went on to fail. Then he when on to E-Stamps that also failed. Then he joined Linux Networks that again went on to failure. Perhaps D-Wave may be his chance to shine but the record so far is clear.
Comment by rrtucci — August 7, 2013 @ 11:41 pm
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