[_Nat_]

They probably sold it to management as exploring future simulation-and-optimization methodologies.

I mean, right now, the D-Wave computers seem too weak to be worth the expense compared to classical computers. So, it seems unreasonable for them to expect near-term practicality from this sort of investigation.

But in principle, if D-Wave systems greatly improve to the point that they're competitive with classical optimizers, then it'd be good for VW engineers to be able to leverage them to do stuff like, in this case, predict chemical properties.

This seems to be how the article sells it:

> “Our present work was a first field study of quantum chemistry problems on quantum annealing devices,” he says. “Our goal was to get a feeling for the bottlenecks of the problem. This in the end helps [us] to understand the underlying problems, and find new solutions or suitable subproblems.”