Quantum computers don't analyze physical systems by reproducing them 1:1 in a different substrate and evolving them. They can be used that way, but it's ineffic

Quantum computers don't analyze physical systems by reproducing them 1:1 in a different substrate and evolving them. They can be used that way, but it's inefficient. For example, you might do chemistry computations in first quantization, where you keep a list of electron locations (each location being a triplet of 2s complement integers, under superposition). You operate on this representation using adders and table lookups and other not-at-all-analog approaches. For example, [1] is about preparing first quantized fermionic states more efficiently. It uses sorting networks to do it. Nature doesn't prepare these states using sorting networks, but that's no reason not to do it in the quantum computer to reduce costs. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41534-018-0071-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41534-018-0071-5