What to do with a near-term quantum computer?
Alan Aspuru-Guzik, University of Toronto
In 2019, Google researchers carried out an experiment where they achieved "quantum supremacy". This is defined as when a quantum computer performs *any* task in a way that a classical computer takes impractical amounts of time to simulate its outcome. This is a huge milestone for the field, but several milestones lie ahead. In this talk, I will describe a potential algorithmic road to "quantum advantage", ie. the moment when a quantum computer carries out a *practical* task on a system that is unreachable by current classical computers. To reach quantum advantage presumably many years of hardware development and algorithmic development lie ahead of us. The current era of quantum computing, coined near-term intermediate-scale quantum computing (NISQ) by John Preskill presents many challenges and opportunities. I will discuss this algorithmic road in the context of algorithms for the simulation of molecules and materials, as well as will briefly mention quantum machine learning applications.