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Key chemistry question answered, no quantum computer required

32 points by defrost

by gilleain

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Ah FeMo-co! One of the cooler cofactors - iron-sulfur cluster, plus a molybdenum, and finally a bridging carbon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeMoco)
So yes, I can understand why it took so long to calculate the energetics of the system:
"This makes measuring FeMo-co’s ground-state energy extraordinarily complex. There are more than 78,000 plausible configurations the electrons might be in"

by hershkumar

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I find it strange that it’s so often framed as a competition between classical and quantum computation, when in practice the development for quantum algorithms has led to many advances in classical computing; quantum algorithms require large systems, and the struggle to represent those large systems classically has led to many different frameworks (tensor networks, neural quantum states, etc) which are interesting even separated from the context of quantum computation.