Disentangling Hype from Practicality: On Realistically Achieving Quantum Advantage

OPERATING ON FUNDAMENTALLY different principles than conventional computers, quantum computers promise to solve a variety of important problems that seemed forever intractable on classical computers. Leveraging the quantum foundations of nature, the time to solve certain problems on quantum computers grows more slowly with the size of the problem than on classical computers-this is called quantum speedup. Going beyond quantum supremacy,(2) which was the demonstration of a quantum computer outperforming a classical one for an artificial problem, an important question is finding meaningful applications (of academic or commercial interest) that can realistically be solved faster on a quantum computer than on a classical one. We call this a practical quantum advantage, or quantum practicality for short.