[_8091149529]

What would be the example of an outstanding, reasonably-sized (even quantum computers of the future have finite resources) quantum simulation problem that is intractable today but would unlock some economic potential, if solved?

[zbobet2012]

Drug molecule interactions, simulations for super conductors, etc. Etc.

[xmcqdpt2]

Drug molecules are much too large for near term QC, let alone the interaction of two of them in a solvent. We're talking thousands of qubits and circuits millions of operations deep.

[lukeplato]

How do you possibly know the details of a future implementation?

[xmcqdpt2]

Quantum chemistry isn't magic, it's been around since the sixties, we understand pretty well the resources required for calculations. I happen to have a PhD in it too. AFAIK on quantum computers there are only two algorithms that are currently considered near-term feasible for this problem (VQE, QPE) and they both require a number of qubits = 2 x number of orbitals N and a number of operations between N^2 and N^4.

It's true that there could be neat quantum computing shortcuts that maintain calculation accuracy and that aren't doable on classical computers... but then we could also imagine that some neat Quantum Chemistry trick might make classical computers much better too. (We actually have a bunch of these already but they are approximative: DFT, machine learning, pseudo potentials etc.)

[lukeplato]

Thank you for the response. i'll need to read more into VQE, QPE. Still, I'm hopeful that geometric/energy minimization methods like invariant point attention in alphafold and other geometric deep learning findings will translate into quantum chemistry someday

[pyinstallwoes]

So quantum computers are just computational statistics?