D-Wave’s Quantum Computer Goes to the Races, Wins

I think that it was trying to prove that it was not an illusion or cheat. There's been a lot of debate about whether D-Wave is actually exploiting quantum phenomena or whether they're (knowingly or not) just faking it. The result of the 3600x speedup is pretty strong evidence to the former, however.

The thing with quantum PCs is that they'll be tuned to solve a certain style of problem - kinda like how a micro-controller will have certain hardware features built out of specific logic gates. It doesn't surprise me therefore that it struggles on more general stuff but that's beside the point.

By proving that they are indeed actually exploiting quantum computation, they validate their theories. This opens them to being able to adapt their hardware to suit particular problems - FFT [1], search [2], factorisation [3], etc. - and sell it as revolutionary hardware to complete that particular task. That's what the 3-letter-acronym government agencies will be after, after all.

Frankly, I'm overjoyed that they have good evidence that there's something 'real' going on here. They already had the backing of Google and some 3-letter-acronym government agencies through the purchase of hardware so that was good circumstantial evidence that they knew something the public didn't. This simply goes to further support their success.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Fourier_transform

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_Algorithm

Agreed. But still quite impressive considering that a single quantumn chip (?) can solve in 1 day what it would take a conventional PC 10 years to solve.