Disentangling Hype from Practicality: On Realistically Achieving
Quantum Advantage
By Torsten Hoefler, Thomas Haner, Matthias Troyer, May 2023
- https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/5/272276-disentangling-hype-from-practicality-on-realistically-achieving-quantum-advantage/fulltext

"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.
There is a maze of hard problems that have been suggested to profit
from quantum acceleration: from cryptanalysis, chemistry and
materials science, to optimization, big data, machine learning,
database search, drug design and protein folding, fluid dynamics
and weather prediction. But which of these applications
realistically offer a potential quantum advantage in practice? For
this, we cannot only rely on asymptotic speedups but must consider
the constants involved. Being optimistic in our outlook for quantum
computers, we identify clear guidelines for quantum practicality
and use them to classify which of the many proposed applications
for quantum computing show promise and which ones would require
significant algorithmic improvements to become practical and
relevant." ...

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