What limits the simulation of quantum computers?
It is imperative that useful quantum computers be very difficult to simulate classically; otherwise classical computers could be used for the applications envisioned for the quantum ones. Perfect quantum computers are unarguably exponentially difficult to simulate: the classical resources required grow exponentially with the number of qubits $N$ or the depth $D$ of the circuit. Real quantum computing devices, however, are characterized by an exponentially decaying fidelity $\mathcal{F} \sim (1-ε)^{ND}$ with an error rate $ε$ per operation as small as $\approx 1\%$ for current devices. In this work, we demonstrate that real quantum computers can be simulated at a tiny fraction of the cost that would be needed for a perfect quantum computer. Our algorithms compress the representations of quantum wavefunctions using matrix product states (MPS), which capture states with low to moderate entanglement very accurately. This compression introduces a finite error rate $ε$ so that the algorithms closely mimic the behavior of real quantum computing devices. The computing time of our algorithm increases only linearly with $N$ and $D$. We illustrate our algorithms with simulations of random circuits for qubits connected in both one and two dimensional lattices. We find that $ε$ can be decreased at a polynomial cost in computing power down to a minimum error $ε_\infty$. Getting below $ε_\infty$ requires computing resources that increase exponentially with $ε_\infty/ε$. For a two dimensional array of $N=54$ qubits and a circuit with Control-Z gates, error rates better than state-of-the-art devices can be obtained on a laptop in a few hours. For more complex gates such as a swap gate followed by a controlled rotation, the error rate increases by a factor three for similar computing time.