*Note room change for this week - this is the usual Physics Colloquium.
Abstract: In the near future, there will likely be special-purpose quantum computers with 50 or so high-quality qubits. In this talk, I'll discuss general theoretical foundations for how to use such devices to demonstrate "quantum supremacy": that is, a clear quantum speedup for *some* task, motivated by the goal of overturning the Extended Church-Turing Thesis (which says that all physical systems can be efficiently simulated by classical computers) as confidently as possible.
Based on recent joint work with Lijie Chen, https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.05903.
.