From the blog: [...] Today, at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2009), we show the progress we have made. We demonstrate a detector that has learned to spot cars by looking at example pictures. It was trained with adiabatic quantum optimization using a D-Wave C4 Chimera chip. There are still many open questions but in our experiments we observed that this detector performs better than those we had trained using classical solvers running on the computers we have in our data centers today.

Levitin and Toffoli have published a paper that is best summed up by the final sentence of the abstract: "These results establish the fundamental quantum limit on the rate of operation of any information-processing system". News article here and paper on arXiv here

The document which serves as the basis for the consultation is the RESEARCH AGENDA for 2011-2013 drafted by the QUROPE governing board. The document gives a motivation for the field, presents the challenges, explains the impact, lists the disciplines involved and describes the level of maturity of the field as well as the stakeholders.

According to PhysicsWorld researchers from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Erlangen, Germany have added another capability to the quantum computing toolkit by being the first to show that light beams of three different wavelengths can be entangled. This achievement could provide a way to create three-way optical communication links between elements of a quantum computer. This result was published in the recent issue of Science magazine.