Comment in New Scientist

I was invited by a reporter at New Scientist to comment on the splashy new result by IBM in Nature. Although it’s an obvious point to many of us working in the field, I used the opportunity to clarify just how slippery the notion of a “beyond-classical” quantum experiement is. We have a long history of back-and-forth between quantum experiments and classical simulation of same: D-wave vs. Matthias Troyer et al. nearly a decade ago, Google’s Quantum Supremacy vs IBM’s Summit Computer back in 2019, and just last week a preprint showing classical simulability of Gaussian Boson Sampling experiments. I suspect this latest result will be no different, although that shouldn’t take away from the exciting experimental achievement by the IBM team.