To the recorded seminar

In this talk I will offer an overview of my Oxford group’s recent work targetting NISQ (noisy intermediate scale quantum) devices. This is an area of tremendous interest at the moment as we are starting to see quantum devices at, or beyond, the practical limits of simulation power of today’s supercomputers. But of course the ability to build a machine that a conventional computer cannot simulate may be a long way from building something useful! Whether or not this can be done in the era before true fault tolerant quantum computers emerge is still an open question. For the answer to be affirmative we will need progress in harnessing the power of shallow circuits with, e.g., better quantum variational algorithms, as well as novel techniques to efficiently mitigate errors, and optimised architectures that recognise the needs of hybrid classical-quantum software. I will discuss these themes and indicate the key challenges.