Hi, dear reader! Lest you worry, I haven’t forgotten about this substack, nor you!
Work has been busy: 2 conferences in the past 3 weeks. While travel is fun and exciting, it also causes other things to get back up (such as posting here).
Along with the travel, I’ve been wrapping up a paper. While I can’t go into too many details, suffice it to say the work – which currently is 24 pages and almost 450 references – should provide a thorough overview of the promise and peril of quantum computing. More to come once it’s done…
While being busy may be a lame excuse for not writing, I wanted to send out a quick update to let you know (a) I’m still alive, and (b) I haven’t forgotten about the ongoing article series we’ve been going through together on a DIY guide to quantum-enhanced machine learning, nor writing additional articles for Quantum Quickies, nor getting started with the Waves for the Future series.
A Useful Quantum Computing Paper
One paper which might be of interest and deserves a shout-out was recently put out by the Amazon quantum computing team, Quantum algorithms: A survey of applications and end-to-end complexities, the abstract of which is below (emphasis mine):
The anticipated applications of quantum computers span across science and industry, ranging from quantum chemistry and many-body physics to optimization, finance, and machine learning. Proposed quantum solutions in these areas typically combine multiple quantum algorithmic primitives into an overall quantum algorithm, which must then incorporate the methods of quantum error correction and fault tolerance to be implemented correctly on quantum hardware. As such, it can be difficult to assess how much a particular application benefits from quantum computing, as the various approaches are often sensitive to intricate technical details about the underlying primitives and their complexities. Here we present a survey of several potential application areas of quantum algorithms and their underlying algorithmic primitives, carefully considering technical caveats and subtleties. We outline the challenges and opportunities in each area in an "end-to-end" fashion by clearly defining the problem being solved alongside the input-output model, instantiating all "oracles," and spelling out all hidden costs. We also compare quantum solutions against state-of-the-art classical methods and complexity-theoretic limitations to evaluate possible quantum speedups. The survey is written in a modular, wiki-like fashion to facilitate navigation of the content. Each primitive and application area is discussed in a standalone section, with its own bibliography of references and embedded hyperlinks that direct to other relevant sections. This structure mirrors that of complex quantum algorithms that involve several layers of abstraction, and it enables rapid evaluation of how end-to-end complexities are impacted when subroutines are altered.
Coming in at 337 pages (wow!), this paper is sure to be a useful reference for how fault-tolerant quantum computers can make an impact in the academic and commercial spheres. (Already cited in the paper I’m writing!)
Travis’ Travels
As noted above, the past few weeks have been hectic with travel. I was in Washington, DC as an attendee for the Quantum World Congress, and in Schenectady, NY as a participant for the GE Quantum Climate Workshop.
You can find videos for Quantum World Congress via this playlist on the ConnectedDMV YouTube channel.
Should you be interested in the topic of quantum computing and climate/sustainability – as well as considerations of the energetics associated with running a quantum computer – you might like these papers: