What Does “Chemically Useful” Actually Mean?
Nicole Bellonzi
Apollo Quantum
As quantum computing efforts increasingly engage with chemistry-motivated problems, questions of accuracy, resource requirements, and benchmarking are often framed as indicators of progress. In practice, however, chemical usefulness is rarely determined by a single metric: in chemistry, accuracy, uncertainty, and computational cost are tightly coupled to the specific decisions a computation is meant to inform.
In this talk, I draw primarily on recent results for ground-state energy estimation in chemically motivated systems to examine how different notions of accuracy and uncertainty shape claims of utility. Rather than proposing new performance targets or general conclusions, the focus is on how results of this type are interpreted in context, including what kinds of inferences they support, where assumptions play a dominant role, and where conclusions become fragile. The goal is to clarify how chemically motivated benchmarks can be read more carefully as the field moves from NISQ demonstrations toward early fault-tolerant regimes.
