Oh sure, I'm all for that in the mean time. But the people funding this are looking for big payoff. I want to be clear that this is not my field and I'm probably a bit behind on the latest, especially on the algorithmic side.
IIRC some of them have done proof of principle solutions to hydrogen atom ground state, for example. I haven't kept up but I'm guessing they've solved more complicated systems by now. I don't know if they've gone beyond ground states.
Taking this particular problem as an example... The challenge, in my mind, is that we already have pretty good classical approaches the problem. Say the limit of current approaches is characterized by something like the number of electrons ( I don't know actual scaling factors) and that number is N_C(lassical). I think the complexity and thus required advances (difficulty) for building special purpose hypothetical quantum ground state solver that can solve the problem for N_Q >> N_C is similar enough to the difficulty required to scale a more general quantum computer to some "problem" size of moderately smaller magnitude that it's probably hard to justify the funding for the special purpose one over the generic one.
I could be way off, and it's very possible there's new algorithms to solve specific problems that I'm unaware of. Such algorithms with an accompanying special purpose quantum computer could make its construction investible in the sense that efficient solutions to problem under consideration are worth enough to offset the cost. Sorry that was very convoluted phrasing but I'm on my phone and I gtg.
IIRC some of them have done proof of principle solutions to hydrogen atom ground state, for example. I haven't kept up but I'm guessing they've solved more complicated systems by now. I don't know if they've gone beyond ground states.
Taking this particular problem as an example... The challenge, in my mind, is that we already have pretty good classical approaches the problem. Say the limit of current approaches is characterized by something like the number of electrons ( I don't know actual scaling factors) and that number is N_C(lassical). I think the complexity and thus required advances (difficulty) for building special purpose hypothetical quantum ground state solver that can solve the problem for N_Q >> N_C is similar enough to the difficulty required to scale a more general quantum computer to some "problem" size of moderately smaller magnitude that it's probably hard to justify the funding for the special purpose one over the generic one.
I could be way off, and it's very possible there's new algorithms to solve specific problems that I'm unaware of. Such algorithms with an accompanying special purpose quantum computer could make its construction investible in the sense that efficient solutions to problem under consideration are worth enough to offset the cost. Sorry that was very convoluted phrasing but I'm on my phone and I gtg.