It turns out a multi-million dollar quantum computer is actually worse at planning a wedding seating chart than your home PC.
April 15, 2026
Original Paper
Entangled happily ever after: Wedding reception seating mapped to classical and quantum optimizers
arXiv · 2604.10497
The Takeaway
Researchers tried to use a cutting-edge quantum annealer (the D-Wave Advantage 2) to solve the classic 'wedding seating chart' problem—trying to seat guests who hate each other at different tables. Surprisingly, the quantum computer struggled to find the best solutions that a simple, decades-old classical math trick (Monte Carlo) found in seconds. This is a humbling 'reality check' for the quantum computing hype; it proves that for many complex human-scale problems, our current quantum hardware is still remarkably inefficient. It’s a hilarious and relatable way of showing that just because a computer is 'quantum' doesn't mean it's actually smarter or faster at everything.
From the abstract
Although optimization is one of the most promising applications of quantum computers, the development of effective optimization strategies requires real-world test cases. When planning our recent wedding reception, we realized that the problem of optimally seating our guests, given constraints related to guests' relatedness, shared interests, and physical needs, could be mapped to a cost function network (CFN) form solvable with classical or quantum optimization algorithms. We compared the seati