D-Wave, a company that makes quantum annealers, has demonstrated their hardware's ability to efficiently track the behavior of a quantum system called an Ising model.
This puts the quantum annealers ahead of the current state-of-the-art classical algorithms in terms of optimization problem solving.
The team behind the work hopes that their results will inspire new numerical techniques for quantum simulation.
The potential of quantum computers still needs to mature, but this development shows promise in their ability to solve problems that classical algorithms struggle with.