My initial instinct is not very important, but we will wait and see.
There have been many, many examples of people achieving significant improvements on many classes of NP-complete problems, and more come out every year, of course the more general your improvement the better. Modern SAT solvers with learning are such an improvement.
The claim of "exponential" seems very dodgy to me, they are running over a fixed set of benchmarks, it's hard to measure an exponential improvement over such a set.
I will wait until I see this peer reviewed, after a brief skim read I am a little worried about how big the circuits they are making are.
EDIT: they mostly compare against 3 specially crafted classes of random problems. Noone really cares about random problems, and it looks to me like they made random problems their system would be particularly good at dealing with. That sets off alarm bells for me.
There have been many, many examples of people achieving significant improvements on many classes of NP-complete problems, and more come out every year, of course the more general your improvement the better. Modern SAT solvers with learning are such an improvement.
The claim of "exponential" seems very dodgy to me, they are running over a fixed set of benchmarks, it's hard to measure an exponential improvement over such a set.
I will wait until I see this peer reviewed, after a brief skim read I am a little worried about how big the circuits they are making are.
EDIT: they mostly compare against 3 specially crafted classes of random problems. Noone really cares about random problems, and it looks to me like they made random problems their system would be particularly good at dealing with. That sets off alarm bells for me.