Google Will Pay You $5M to Figure Out What the Hell Quantum Computers Do

Computational chemistry seems like the obvious application. I guess the existing methods that run on classical computers are accurate enough for most purposes. These methods become prohibitively expensive for large systems but modern quantum computers are no were near big enough to be useful there anyway.

Quantum Algorithm Zoo lists algorithmic speedups: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantumalgorithmzoo.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantumalgorithmzoo.org&#x2F;</a><p>What are the known applications for the known quantum algorithms?<p>What are existing NP problems that will be faster with enough coherent qubits and interconnect and storage?<p>&quot;Ask HN: What has quantum computing achieved so far?&quot; (2023) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38822569#38830067">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38822569#38830067</a>

The reality is that there don&#x27;t seem to be many applications that can&#x27;t be solved with a regular computer. Yes, there are some applications like crypto algorithms, but they were designed to be especially hard to compute. So far, quantum machines haven&#x27;t shown any real results, even on the simplest toy examples from cryptography.<p>Most engineering problems can be solved with a bit of careful approximation. You really don&#x27;t need all of the craziness of these supercooled monstrosities. I&#x27;ll be very curious to see if anyone can come up with a real application that needs them.

I won&#x27;t believe quantum computers are more than noise simulators until I see quantum computing factor large composite numbers. To me, that&#x27;s the &quot;flying car&quot; we were promised.

Original source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;technology&#x2F;research&#x2F;google-gesda-and-xprize-launch-new-competition-in-quantum-applications&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;technology&#x2F;research&#x2F;google-gesda-and-xpr...</a><p>tl;dr: Google has spent billions of dollars on quantum computing and still can&#x27;t find a single case where it does better than a thousand-dollar laptop. If you can help Google justify its billions of spending then you can win a handful of millions.

I mean it would be really nice if we solve really large scale optimization problems (mixed integer nonlinear) to global optimality, fast.<p>But we already do today with some gross approximations and some suboptimality.