The dynamics across a phase transition in a cosmological setting was studied by Sir Thomas W. B. Kibble, who predicted the formation of topological defects such as cosmic strings. LANL Fellow Wojciech H. Zurek recognized that such cosmological principles could be tested in the laboratory. Decades later, the study of topological defects has resurfaced in a different context: quantum computing. Quantum annealing devices and quantum optimization algorithms solve computational problems by finding low-energy configurations of complex spin systems. In this context,  computational errors result in excitations and topological defects, as demonstrated in D-Wave annealing devices and IBM digital quantum computers. Cutting-edge research focuses on reducing such errors by harnessing shortcuts to adiabaticity, an approach that has led to a new family of counterdiabatic quantum algorithms.