In a comment to my Optical Molasses post Tom Slee said:

Very cool indeed. But as to quantum computing, I’m terminally sceptical. See here.

On Tuesday, completely unaware of Tom’s skepticism :-), D-Wave systems demonstrated their Orion quantum computer. A description of this 16 qubit system comes from D-Wave founder Geordie Rose in his Blog post about the demo:

The Orion system is a hardware accelerator designed to solve a particular NP-complete problem called the two dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field. It is built around a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor. The system is designed to be used in concert with a conventional front end for any application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem.

Very cool (literally)!!!

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