I was reading that they used sudoku as an example to test quantum computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems
alex
On February 13, 2007, D-Wave demonstrated the Orion system, running three different
applications at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
This marked the first public demonstration of, supposedly, a quantum computer and associated service.
The first application, an example of pattern matching, performed a search for a similar compound
to a known drug within a database of molecules. The next application computed a seating arrangement
for an event subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities between guests. The last involved solving
a Sudoku puzzle.
The processors at the heart of D-Wave's "Orion quantum computing system" are hardware
accelerators designed to solve a particular NP-complete problem related to the two dimensional
Ising model in a magnetic field.[7] D-Wave terms the device a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic
quantum computer processor.[18][19]
According to the company, a conventional front end running an application that requires
the solution of an NP-complete problem, such as pattern matching, passes the problem
to the Orion system. However, the company does not make the claim its systems can
solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
According to Dr. Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave, NP-complete
problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get"
so the adiabatic quantum computer used by the Orion system is intended to quickly compute an
approximate solution.[20]
