Over recent years, interest in quantum information processing has increased tremendously. This rise was fueled by activities of massive commercial players like
IBM, Google,
Microsoft and large investments in startups like
D-Wave,
Rigetti,
Xanadu,
Zapata and
Cambridge Quantum Computing. The work of these companies typically focuses on
universal quantum computers, which hold the premise of exponential speed-up for a variety of NP-hard problems. However, this
universality usually comes at the price of algorithmic overhead for a wide range of tasks which generally leads to worse overall fidelity. If we give up the constraint of a universal quantum computer, we can build
specialized quantum hardware for the problems of interest. Such systems are called
quantum simulators.