The D-wave machine is different from a general purpose quantum computer which is why it can have many more qubits than the more traditional approach that you are most like to have heard of in the press. That said no one knows what the power of this type of machine is and calling in a quantum computer is probably stretching it a bit. Here are some details for those interested: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-D-Wave-One-a-true-quantum-comput...
So to me it seems that the people building tools for collaborative science need to start with a system whose sole goal is to produce papers :) How to do this is a fun problem.
"Mark wrote a paper about this ten years later, after physicists had published thousands of bogus papers using bogus statistics."
Agreed, but to be fair a lot of non-physicists were also doing this. For example in their excellent review article http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062 Mark Newman, Aaron Clauset, and Cosma Shalizi show that a claimed power law in bytes received per http request was wrong. I'm not going to defend the sloppiness of physicists, but I would note that other fields don't fare as well in this either.
And I wish you or Mark had written that paper earlier too!
e^(τi)-1=0. This is obviously better since it not only contains the fundamental constants e, tau, and the beautiful numbers 0 and 1, it also includes a minus sign, emphasizing the fact that we are working over a field with an additive inverse. ;)
The result, IIRC, is that all of QIP can be done in three rounds, whereas if the same held in the classical world the polynomial hierarchy would collapse (which is considered about as likely as P=NP). Not of practical value, but it does point out that QIP is a slightly different beast than IP when you include the number of rounds.
No. It means that for the complexity class of interactive proofs quantum and classical are the same (when you ignore the number of rounds involved.) This doesn't tell us anything about whether quantum polynomial time equals classical polynomial time. The "IP" classes have problems that are very intractable...this basically says that for these very intractable problems quantum won't help (with the caveat that the quantum seems to allow fewer rounds in the interactive proof.)