D-Wave’s supposed quantum computers have attracted plenty of skepticism alongside some serious interest from huge corporations such as Google and Lockheed Martin. Now recent testing has shown that D-Wave’s machine can indeed beat standard computers head-to-head in solving certain problems.

The D-Wave computer performed up to 3600 times faster than a high-performance machine running IBM software while solving an optimization problem, according to the New York Times. D-Wave’s machine only proved slightly faster than the standard computing on two other optimization problem tests, but the results still seem encouraging for the company’s future prospects. (and there still exists the problem to make sure these are INDEED quantum computers, actually using quantum entanglement) (1, 2, 3, 4)

In any case, we are getting closer and closer to that hillarious moment where we will ask the super-computer “What is the secret of Life?” and it will answer “42”… In just 0.5 seconds! 🙂