Welcome to another episode of The New Quantum Era Podcast hosted by Kevin Rowney and Sebastian Hassinger. Today, they are joined by Cesar A. Rodriguez  Rosario, Chief Scientific Officer at Strangeworks, who is discussing the parallels between quantum computing and the development of the classical computing world at the stage of vacuum tubes and the invention of the transistor.

Cesar Rodriguez is a great example of somebody who is knowledgeable about the space of Quantum Computing and sees its possibility but he's got a decent level of guarded optimism and even skepticism on some of these results, which sometimes run fits and starts and sometimes even go backward.

Key Takeaways:

[4:33] Cesar shares what brought him into Quantum Computing.

[5:35] Cesar talks about his academic background

[11:39] Coming from computer engineering and having an unconventional journey through quantum physics, does Cesar consider he has a different perspective on the field today? 

[15:28] Given the current stage of technology, what does Cesar think of the role of foreign theorists? 

[17:37] How does Cesar view the reliability and the breakthrough potential of the currently existing crop of algorithms given the current limits?

[18:57] Cesar explains what QUantum Advantage is.

[21:08] From the landscape of the current algorithms out there, does  Cesar feel like there's an imminent breakthrough in these scare algorithms? 

[23:05] Will there going to be more "dequantized" algorithms?

[24:35] Cesar shares what he calls Quantum Value.

[25:21] Looking at the theory landscape, what are the most exciting things to Cesar?

[29:20] Does everything still fit into the general buckets of VQE and QAOA? Are there other categories that are emerging that are distinct enough from those two approaches that they have their own acronym yet?

[30:52] What does quantization mean?

[33:49] Cesar explains why quantum computers are fundamentally better at some problems than classical computers.

[37:33] Cesar defines the molecular geometry problem

[39:50] Cesar speaks of the beginning of Quantum Computing.

[42:53] Cesar talks about a recent major breakthrough.

[45:48] Cesar talks about the complexity of photonics.

[48:28] Cesar shares the challenge of speed.

[52:10] Kevin and Sebastian share the highlights of an interesting conversation with Cesar A. Rodriguez Rosario.

Resources:
Visit The New Quantum Era Podcast

Google's 2019 quantum supremacy experiment
A classical attack on Google's supremacy claim
An overview of Quantum supremacy
The variational quantum eigensolver algorithm paper from Alan Asperu-Guzik's group at Harvard
Eddie Farhi and Jeffrey Goldstone's Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm paper
Nature paper on error correction on spin qubits in diamond
The Chip, by T. R. Reid is a terrific book for understanding the early history of classical computing.

Tweetables and Quotes:

“You can use some qubits and their quality is really, really good. You can connect them very, very efficiently, and you can connect as many as you want, in a way that scales, we have to do all those things… and nobody has cracked the code for all these bullet points.” — Cesar A. Rodriguez Rosario

“Ideally, what's going to happen is that once we have the scalable error corrected qubits and all that, then you don't have to be a theorist anymore, and then I'm going to be a full-time quantum engineer and that will be healthy, I want that to happen since that would mean that the industry succeeded.”  — Cesar A. Rodriguez Rosario

“It's okay, that things are not useful, yet, there's nothing wrong with that, because we're still working towards that.” — Cesar A. Rodriguez Rosario