Ask HN: Can anyone explain how DWave was able to scale to 1,800 qubits?

Ask HN: Can anyone explain how DWave was able to scale to 1,800 qubits?
10 by arthurcolle | 5 comments on Hacker News.
I have a bunch of questions about the recent Nature article and about the underlying simulation itself. 1) how are the individual qubits arranged/"built" 2) what is specifically meant by the topological phenomenon observed, and how does this relate to the quantum simulator accurately predicting what the classical model said what occur? 3) what is the interplay between "performing a computation" and running a quantum simulator? not really seeing the immediate connection there 4) last, not sure how far DWave had come previously to achieving such a large-scale computation with this approach, but it does seem like a pretty huge number of interacting qubits compared to other highly-entangled systems Thanks Link to Nature article in question: https://ift.tt/2OSeXSs