Yuri Pashkin at Lancaster University, UK, prefers to call D-Wave’s machine a “simulator” of a quantum system, but he says that it is fair for the company to claim computational supremacy – within a very narrow scenario. “It’s a very specific task and it’s not a universal computer or simulator that they demonstrate,” says Pashkin. “And that’s it, you can’t use it for anything else.” While the Ising model problems have obvious applications in physics, a range of optimisation problems that would be useful for the logistics and finance industries can also be represented in a similar way, though Pashkin says it remains to be seen how many practical problems can actually be computed by D-Wave’s systems.