Boson sampling
Boson sampling is a computational task particularly friendly to quantum computers as opposed to classical computers. As explained by Philip Ball, it "entails calculating the probability distribution of many bosons — a category of fundamental particle that includes photons — whose quantum waves interfere with one another in a way that essentially randomizes the position of the particles", thus generating "an equation in many unknowns." == Background == Boson sampling is a restricted model of non-universal quantum computation introduced by Scott Aaronson and Alex Arkhipov after the original work of Lidror Troyansky and Naftali Tishby, that explored possible use of boson scattering to evaluate expectation values of permanents of matrices.