Quantum Computing: A hype-avoiding introduction

Quantum computing is generating more hype than ever among the race to boast the most qubits and prophecies about encryption Armageddon, but how much of this hype is reasonable? This talk will start with a brief introduction to quantum computation, then it will present the main technical features and challenges of the most popular approaches to quantum computing (quantum gates, annealing, and, briefly, quantum simulators). Doing this, will try to avoid all this hype and provide an honest review of what is possible, and useful, to achieve on current Noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines, with a particular focus on combinatorial optimization. Finally, a short demo of an optimization problem solved on D-Wave machines will be provided.