I just watched this video on how the crew from D-Wave build their quantum computers.

You haven’t heard of D-Wave? You will.

They sell the world’s only commercial quantum computer, and recently announced an impressive new customer: a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association. What are they doing together? Research artificial intelligence.

In May 2013, D-Wave published a comparison of their technology against regular top-end desktop computers running an optimization algorithm. Using a configuration with 439 qubits, the system performed 3,600 times as fast as the best algorithm (CPLEX) on the conventional machine, solving problems with 100 or more variables in half a second compared with half an hour.