[wasabi991011]

> One major point of the presentation here is that it's not making real progress.

How are you measuring "real progress"?

> People are still publishing papers, but they have done nothing with an effect outside their little community.

Having an effect outside the research community is essentially a Heaviside function. Before the field is mature enough, there is no effect outside, but once the field is mature enough, there is an effect outside. Makes it hard to judge if there is any progress or not.

[pclmulqdq]

The field has had 40 years of maturing. Experimentation on QC started in the 1980's. At what point are we going to be factoring numbers or (more realistically) simulating chemical interactions?

Real progress in this field is very easy to measure. It's based on number of effective qbits of computation. That is just a metric where QC is failing to deliver so badly that everyone in the field wants to deny its existence.

Unfortunately, the level of investment in QC is very much outsized compared to the level of progress. These things should rise at the same time. More promising areas of science can get the investment that is otherwise being sucked into QC.

> Having an effect outside the research community is essentially a Heaviside function.

This is something that people like to say but is never true. Impact on the outside world for new technologies is almost always a sigmoid function, not a heavyside function. You should see some residual beneficial effects at the leading edge if you have something real.

[fxwin]

> Real progress in this field is very easy to measure. It's based on number of effective qbits of computation.

Plenty more progress measures (decoherence, gate fidelity/error rates) to use that we have made significant progress in over the last 10 years.