From the article > So far there has been a lot of excitement but also a lot of crushed dreams and backtracking, when solutions giving a quantum boost were late

From the article > So far there has been a lot of excitement but also a lot of crushed dreams and backtracking, when solutions giving a quantum boost were later again beaten by classical computers, e.g. Ewin Tang showed this in some cases last summer (check his paper or story in Quanta). Minor: Ewin is a woman. The paper referred to is at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.04271.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.04271.pdf