Quantum chemistry ex faculty member here who left for industry: OP is 100% correct to call out this BS and this preprint is just another attempt to abuse real science to promote a failing business experiment.
Because you can view today's error prone QCs as analog emulators of other quantum systems without solving error correction, often people reach to such "simulations". Google is equally guilty. Unfortunately most materials you touch reflect the behavior of electrons which are indistinguishable fermions. Their interactions are long ranged and maintain quantum correlations with all the electrons within the screening length. The spins of a flux qubit are distinguishable, and the pattern of connectivity in existing chips limit direct interactions to a handful of such qubits. Both these differences can be emulated away but at nonlinear cost. Ie even for this toy case there is no advantage . The entire thing is a fugazi. Once you also lump in the basis sets needed to make a realistic simulation and the fact that relativity is needed to describe this complex, the simulation might as well be comparing Looney tunes physics to Newton's principia.
When I was a postdoc with Alan people were playing these same games, making the same claims the same way. Even without the required 4 years of grad physics to understand what's happening a smart person could see the lack of impact over decades and reason this is BS.
But the play works to raise more money than you can make as faculty or a software dev, so people will keep running this play, perhaps until Google tires of it. It's not that making better quantum computers is stupid we should invest in the hardware dev, but not at the expense of science and truth.
Quantum chemistry ex faculty member here who left for industry: OP is 100% correct to call out this BS and this preprint is just another attempt to abuse real science to promote a failing business experiment.
Because you can view today's error prone QCs as analog emulators of other quantum systems without solving error correction, often people reach to such "simulations". Google is equally guilty. Unfortunately most materials you touch reflect the behavior of electrons which are indistinguishable fermions. Their interactions are long ranged and maintain quantum correlations with all the electrons within the screening length. The spins of a flux qubit are distinguishable, and the pattern of connectivity in existing chips limit direct interactions to a handful of such qubits. Both these differences can be emulated away but at nonlinear cost. Ie even for this toy case there is no advantage . The entire thing is a fugazi. Once you also lump in the basis sets needed to make a realistic simulation and the fact that relativity is needed to describe this complex, the simulation might as well be comparing Looney tunes physics to Newton's principia.
When I was a postdoc with Alan people were playing these same games, making the same claims the same way. Even without the required 4 years of grad physics to understand what's happening a smart person could see the lack of impact over decades and reason this is BS.
But the play works to raise more money than you can make as faculty or a software dev, so people will keep running this play, perhaps until Google tires of it. It's not that making better quantum computers is stupid we should invest in the hardware dev, but not at the expense of science and truth.