About JPT. Your submission has been received! Computer scientists believe that P and NP are distinct classes, but actually proving that distinctness is the hardest and most important open problem in the field. Learn Start your journey! They have not, however, been able to find an efficient algorithm for identifying the prime factors of large numbers. Learn more about who we are and what we do. Kevin Hong for Quanta Magazine. To simulate exotic magnetism, King and his team used the D-Wave 2,qubit system, which was recently revised to reduce noise, to model a programmable quantum magnetic system, just like Berezinskii, Kosterlitz, and Thouless did in the s to observe the unusual states of matter. Written by. Optimization is searching for an optimal solution in a finite or countably infinite set of potential solutions of a cost function, which is set to be maximized or minimized.