In the months after such an announcement you can expect articles with various attempts at an application to pop up on arxiv. I am saying "attempts at an application", not because the papers are not impressive, rather because the devices are still too small and noisy to excite anyone but researchers in the field. As a researcher in the field I am certainly very excited, because the figure of merit I care about have been drastically improved and this reinforced my belief that we will have a device solving classically-infeasible chemistry simulations soon (anything between 5 and 15 year ;)
As much as I would love to see quantum computers contributing to quantum chemistry, it's unclear that having more computation would magically solve any actual practical real world applied problem in chemistry.
I assume you're saying classically infeasible to refer to the O(n*7) scaling of some QM basis functions?
Your assumption is correct, and your cautiousness is warranted. I do expect the polynomial complexity to become better with future improvements in algorithms. Either way, it is on us fanboys to make devices that fulfill these claims.
Best of luck. having my skepticism disproved by the QC folks woudl be a major win, but it's not something I'd spend my time on. I think it makes more sense to improve existing codes to run as fast as possible on the biggest supercomputers we have, although even that isn't super useful because, as far as I can tell, better chemical simulations don't lead to better applied science in the field of chemistry.
Would you have examples of such simulations at hand? Or links describing some of them? I know next to nothing about quantum computing but I’ve always loved a good infeasible problem.
Feynman's 1981 "Simulating Physics with Computers" is one of the first mentions of how it is (naively) exponentially expensive to store on a classical computer the quantum state of something with n degrees of freedom (a molecule made of multiple atoms). He suggests (vaguely) the notion of a quantum computer. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=simulating%20physics%2...
It is less known that a Russian scientist made similar remarks at the same time.
This "Science" news blurb pops up on google as an intro as well https://www.science.org/content/article/quantum-computer-sim... . Although it makes you laugh when you notice that the principle was suggested in 1981, formalized in the mid 90s, initial experimental successes in late 00s, and today we are barely simulating 3 atom molecules. In our defense, it was a 100 years between Babbage, passing through Turing, and getting to something like ENIAC. And a few more decades before the PC.
I apologize, what I was attempting to say was "here it is way less known that a scientist in Russia made the same observations at the same time". I will edit my comment.
