Yay for Quantum Computing!

13 times it succeeded out of 10,000 tries? Hmm, makes Microsoft's windows look promising. I'll be impressed when it solves problems 9,999 times out of 10,000. i can live with a little tiny error.

Hate to be a downer, but this doesn't seem to be any improvement to current computing. And the thought that all that has to be done is increase it's computing power doesn't seem to be any different than adding power to current computing....so where will this take us in the end?

Maybe these new quantum computers will figure out a way to fold space. Then we can get on with the business of interstellar colonization.

I wonder how many times out of 10,000 tries a monkey would get it right? Just wondering if it statistically significant.

Yes Bew, what exactly is the success rate of a monkey solving six-amino-acid folding sequences under the Miyazawa-Jernigan lattice-model?
A working, commercially available quantum computer is a big deal. It is long way away from mass market but this is still a significant benchmark.
In normal computing there are two states, 0 or 1. In quantum computing there are multiple possible states or quantum bits (qbits) so it has the potential to scale exponentially.

It would have been helpful if the author had posted what a purely random approach would have yielded so we can gauge what the significance of 13/10000 is, since otherwise it looks lousy.

@Adrien the short answer is 0/10,000 but check out folding@home (http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Science), it is a distributed computing platform that uses mostly donated CPU cycles to complete protein folding.
Here is a quote from the page:
"It's amazing that not only do proteins self-assemble -- fold -- but they do so amazingly quickly: some as fast as a millionth of a second. While this time is very fast on a person's timescale, it's remarkably long for computers to simulate. In fact, it can take about a day to simulate about a hundred nanoseconds (1/1,000,000,000 of a second). Unfortunately, many proteins fold on the millisecond timescale (1,000,000 nanoseconds). Thus, it would take 10,000 CPU days to simulate folding -- i.e. it would take 30 CPU years! That's a long time to wait for one result"
If you are just adding a couple numbers in a single computation it is possible for a random result to occasionally equal the correct result but for something as incredibly complex with as many calculations required to complete a protein folding sequence the odds of a random result being correct are abysmal.

In other news: "What?!! Quantum computers are real!?!"

I think 13 out of 10,000 means the 13 correct minimum configurations out of 10,000 possible non minimum configurations. It doesn't mean 13 correct out of 10,000 correct.