Dominik Hangleiter’s View Posts on: Has Quantum Advantage Been Achieved?

In a recent post on Quantum Frontiers—the first in a series of three—Dominik Hangleiter discusses the question of whether quantum advantage (also known as “quantum supremacy”) has been achieved.

Dominik describes polling audiences of experimental and theoretical physicists (with a few computer scientists) at recent talks, expecting overwhelming agreement that quantum advantage had already been demonstrated. Instead, he found that less than half of the audience believed this to be the case, despite several experimental claims since 2019 and even earlier quantum simulation results.

These reactions motivated Dominik’s mini-series, whose goal is to argue that existing quantum computers can already perform tasks beyond the reach of classical computers. In the first post, he reviews the notion of quantum advantage, focusing especially on random circuit sampling experiments, and explains that current claims rely on proxies and extrapolations from classically tractable regimes. He announces that Part 2 will examine the evidence for these claims and address skeptical arguments.

From my perspective, the question of whether large-scale quantum computational advantage has been achieved is a very important one and deserves careful scrutiny. (I myself have worked over the years on assessing this question, as well as the more fundamental question of whether quantum supremacy can be achieved at all.)  Related questions—such as progress toward quantum error-correcting codes and the status of Majorana zero modes—are also of great importance.

Finally, there was a remark on Dominik’s post from a researcher in India who works in applications of quantum computing for agriculture, and coverage on a quantum communication blog based in Pakistan. It is heartwarming to see how science through research in quantum computation can bring together scientists from India and Pakistan.