The event will be live-streamed on the Society’s YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter Account. No registration required.

Within the past two years, groups at Google and USTC China made the first serious claims of “quantum supremacy”: that is, the use of quantum computers to solve certain contrived sampling problems faster than any existing classical computer using any currently-known method. These experiments built on theoretical work that I and others did over the last decade. In this talk, I’ll try to start with these experiments — what exactly was done, the criticisms raised against these experiments and against the whole concept of quantum supremacy, the responses to some of the criticisms — and then work forward, to the fraught, hype-filled landscape of (alleged) near-term applications of noisy quantum computers, the eventual applications of full fault-tolerant quantum computers, and finally what quantum computing means for our understanding of the world.