“Different options give you different results,” Holzmann says, “and we haven’t thought about many of these options yet.”
For instance, Nicole Holzmann, who leads the applications and algorithms team at Riverlane, and her colleagues have shown that quantum algorithms to calculate the ground-state energies of around 50 orbital electrons can be made radically more efficient5. Previous estimates of the runtime of such algorithms had come in at more than 1,000 years. But Holzmann and her colleagues found that tweaks to the routines — altering how the algorithmic tasks are distributed around the various quantum logic gates, for example — cut the theoretical runtime to just a few days. That’s a gain in speed of around five orders of magnitude. “Different options give you different results,” Holzmann says, “and we haven’t thought about many of these options yet.”