How do we quantify the utility of quantum algorithms?

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Quantum computing advantage emerges not from brute force power, but from subtle differences in information processing that can occur for key bottleneck subroutines. In 2019, the Google Quantum AI team performed a landmark experiment demonstrating quantum computational supremacy (Arute et al., 2019) where they performed a quantum computation that, at the time, could not be done on a classical supercomputer. This was remarkable because it was achieved by a processor with only 53 qubits, an observation that emerged from theoretical work which identified that quantum computers could have a massive advantage for certain specially designed benchmarking tasks (Boixo et al., 2018; Bremner et al., 2016).