University of Chicago researchers and their colleagues at University
College London have performed a proof-of-concept experiment that will aid the
future development of programmable quantum computers.
Many complex problems are difficult and slow to solve using
conventional computers, and over the last several years, research has grown
steadily toward developing quantum computation. In particular, optimization
problems such as the “traveling salesman” problem, which calculates the
shortest possible route needed to visit a set of towns, become intractable as
the number of towns grows.