Nasa buys into 'quantum' computer

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. Wow! Really?

In one case it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes.

A classic example of one of these "combinatorial optimisation" problems is that of the travelling sales rep, who needs to visit several cities in one day, and wants to know the shortest path that connects them all together in order to minimise their mileage.

Aren't all those NP hard problems mappable to each other? I mean I thought if you could do one, you could pretty much do them all.

If so, wow! They really got it going on. The code breaking implications are profound also.