[math-fun] homespun computing conspiracy

Last Sunday an episode of The Simpsons aired where Lisa discovers a loom-based computer. After having it print out a cross-stitched “Hello World”, she inputs 27 x 35 on a type of punched card and the loom responds with 945, the first odd abundant number (https://oeis.org/A005231). Today D-Wave/Google announced a breakthrough in quantum computing, more precisely, “quantum annealing” (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.02206v1.pdf). The proof-of-principle demonstration was an optimization problem involving 945 variables. -Veit