What we’ve learned from NISQ application experiments on Sycamore

Does implementing larger and more accurate examples of VQE, QAOA and the like actually teach us anything useful about quantum computing? Or are we wasting our time on refinements of these NISQ favorites if none of them are going to scale to the classically intractable regime without a significant breakthrough? In this talk, I will reflect on these questions in the context of Google’s recent application demonstration experiments on the Sycamore quantum processor.