[qnleigh]

I know what you're talking about, but I think you happened to pick a bad example to pick on here. This wind tunnel analogy resembles a common criticism of the prior experiments that were done by Google and others over the last few years. Those experiments ran highly unstructured, arbitrary circuits that don't compute anything useful. They hardly resembled the kind of results that you would expect from a general purpose, programmable computer. It's a valid criticism, and it seems like the above commenter came to this conclusion on their own.

To that comment, the present result is a step up from these older experiments in that they a) Run a more structured circuit b) Use the device to compute something reproducible (as opposed to sampling randomly from a certain probability distribution) c) The circuits go toward simulating a physical system of real-world relevance to chemistry.

Now you might say that even c) is just a quantum computer simulating another quantum thing. All I'll say is that if you would only be convinced by a quantum computer factoring a large number, don't hold your breath: https://algassert.com/post/2500

[fwip]

Thanks for the reply and explanation. I admit that I'm not well-versed in quantum computers (trying to understand even basic quantum mechanics seems to elude me), and I deeply appreciate the link for further reading.