Welcome to the Quanta Audio Edition.

In each of these bi-weekly episodes, we bring you a story direct from the Quanta website

about developments in basic science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

It's been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than

classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks.

That's next.

Check out this feed every Tuesday for the Quanta podcast.

That's where editor-in-chief Samir Patel talks to our writers and editors about more of

Quanta's most popular, interesting, and thought-provoking stories. For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering.

First, they must choose a problem to solve, basically pick a peak to climb.

And then they have to develop a strategy to solve it,

or figure out how to climb that peak. Classical and quantum researchers compete using different

strategies with a healthy rivalry between the two. Quantum researchers report a fast way to solve a

problem, often by scaling a peak that no one thought

worth climbing. Classical teams then race to see if they can find a better way. This contest almost

always ends in a virtual tie. When researchers think they've devised a quantum algorithm

that works faster or better than anything else, classical researchers usually

come up with one that equals it. Recently, a purported quantum speed-up, published in the journal

Science, was met with immediate skepticism from two separate groups that showed how to perform

similar calculations on classical machines.

But in a paper posted on the scientific preprint site, Archive.org, last year,

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