Nature Electronics: moving quantum computing from engineered advantage to practical utility

[Scott98]

a short comment piece by He-Liang Huang of the Henan Key Laboratory of Quantum Information and Cryptography in Zhengzhou, China. The title sums up the argument well: moving quantum computing from engineered advantage to practical utility. Most of the piece is behind a paywall, but the main point is clear from the opening. It is only three pages long

Huang's argument is that quantum computers have now shown advantages over classical machines, but mostly on tasks designed specifically to show that advantage. Random circuit sampling and similar benchmarks prove the hardware can do something hard. The challenge now is turning those carefully controlled demonstrations into calculations that deliver real practical value

This fits neatly with the IBM story we discussed recently, where a 19 second run was estimated to take a supercomputer 110 years. That was impressive, but the task itself had no real world use. Almost every quantum advantage claim so far has been in the same category. Useful results are what investors and governments will eventually demand

The obvious candidates for practical use are chemistry, materials science and certain optimisation problems. Simulating molecules is something quantum computers should naturally be good at, since nature itself is quantum. But getting there needs far more reliable qubits, working error correction and algorithms that beat the best classical methods on problems people care about

I think this is a healthy message from inside the field. Hype has run ahead of reality for years, and a push towards useful results is what the industry needs. It is a message worth repeating. What do you think will be the first practical problem a quantum computer solves better than a classical one?

Moving quantum computing from engineered advantage to practical utility - Nature Electronicswww.nature.com