In May 1981 renowned physicist Richard Feynman delivered a talk entitled 'Simulating physics with computers', Feynman detailed his thinking on the limits of the use of classical computers to accurately describe physical systems and exhorted the development of novel computing devices which would enable the accurate simulation of the physical world, being themselves 'quantum' in nature . Around the same time, others were similarly thinking of novel quantum modes of computation, and a summary of the genesis of the field and the time since Feynman's lecture can be found here in Ref. .