> The first aspect that you mention is actually not a disagreement but the whole point of his message - the recently popularized demonstrations of "quantum supr

> The first aspect that you mention is actually not a disagreement but the whole point of his message - the recently popularized demonstrations of "quantum supremacy" did not allow for universal programmability, but instead were more comparable to an experimental setup for a particular problem of how do atoms behave in that setup. Where does Wilczek claim that? The only sentence I can see where he arguably comments on the programmability of Google's device is "the computation that Sycamore performed is very specialized". But this is before he brings up the carbon example, and he never says the programmability of Sycamore is comparable to the programmability of carbon. Indeed, Sycamore is programable. It's obviously not capable of arbitrary-length computations, because the noise level is too high to be fault tolerant, but it has a certain accessible state space in which it can be arbitrarily configured. Here's Scott Aaronson if you don't believe me (emphasis mine): > [Question:] Even so, there are countless examples of materials and chemical reactions that are hard to classically simulate, as well as special-purpose quantum simulators (like those of Lukin’s group at Harvard). Why don’t these already count as quantum computational supremacy? > [Answer:] Under some people’s definitions of “quantum computational supremacy,” they do! The key difference with Google’s effort is that they have a fully programmable device—one that you can program with an arbitrary sequence of nearest-neighbor 2-qubit gates, just by sending the appropriate signals from your classical computer. > In other words, it’s no longer open to the QC skeptics to sneer that, sure, there are quantum systems that are hard to simulate classically, but that’s just because nature is hard to simulate, and you don’t get to arbitrarily redefine whatever random chemical you find in the wild to be a “computer for simulating itself.” Under any sane definition, the superconducting devices that Google, IBM, and others are now building are indeed “computers.” https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4317 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4317 Therefore, I think abdullahkhalids's interpretation is right: Wilczek's carbon analogy is inapplicable.