Physicists developed a whole bunch of tools to find the base energy levels of spinglasses, which were repurposed in the past 10 years as general purpose solvers for NP hard combinatorial optimization problems (by converting them to QUBO format, which is equivalent to the Ising format in spinglasses). There are pros and cons to them, but it opened a whole new area in optimization, currently multiple companies are building custom hardware QUBO solvers (D-Wave, NTT, Fujitsu, Hitachi, ...)