Weapons of mass simulation: Smashing down the barriers to building a robust quantum computer, for great justice!

Quantum computation holds the potential to bring forth a new age of science and engineering when currently intractable problems can be routinely solved on a quantum computer. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to design a quantum computer that is robust to noise. I shall present an overview of two tools that leverage classical computational power to attack this problem. The first tool, CodeQuest, is an algorithm that computes the optimal quantum error-correcting (subsystem) code that can be implemented using an arbitrary input set of quantum (Pauli) measurements, which proves particularly useful for searching through large sets of choices of measurements to see if any of them result in a useful code. The second tool, Matrix Product States, is a formalism providing a family of ansatzs that one can use to compute the lowest-lying eigenspectra of a Hamiltonian by employing the variational method. I shall briefly explain how each of these tools works. In particular, I shall demonstrate how they allow us to leverage classical computational power to solve important research problems and so bring closer the day when we can wield quantum computers to slay some of the problems that currently vex us.