The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) quantum benchmarking program has found that quantum computing is living up to its promise for some use cases but falling short in others.
DARPA said: “It is unclear, at this point, whether any advantage can be achieved for applications in nonlinear differential equations.” These types of equations underlie forecasting use cases, such as predicting financial market movements and weather modeling, previously considered poster boy use cases for quantum computing.
Some results showed that positive results could potentially be achieved if more powerful, fault-tolerant hardware is developed. Two teams from Rigetti Computing and Zapata Computing estimated the required quantum computing resources for the applications to estimate whether using quantum computers would pay off.
They found it is plausible that quantum computers will provide an advantage for economically valuable applications in certain chemistry, quantum materials and materials science applications.
“Quantum benchmarking set out to quantitatively measure progress towards specific, transformational computational challenges, as well as estimate the hardware-specific resources required for a given level of benchmark performance,” said Joe Altepeter, program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, as cited by Informa. “The findings in these pre-prints mark an important first step toward quantifying the impact of quantum computers.”