Multiple steps toward the 'quantum singularity'

In early 2011, a pair of theoretical computer scientists at MIT proposed an optical experiment that would harness the weird laws of quantum mechanics to perform a computation impossible on conventional computers. Commenting at the time, a quantum-computing researcher at Imperial College London said that the experiment "has the potential to take us past what I would like to call the 'quantum singularity,' where we do the first thing quantumly that we can't do on a classical computer."