The difficulty of simulating quantum systems, well-known to quantum chemists,
prompted the idea of quantum computation. One can avoid the steep scaling
associated with the exact simulation of increasingly large quantum systems on
conventional computers, by mapping the quantum system to another, more
controllable one. In this review, we discuss to what extent the ideas in
quantum computation, now a well-established field, have been applied to
chemical problems. We describe algorithms that achieve significant advantages
for the electronic-structure problem, the simulation of chemical dynamics,
protein folding, and other tasks. Although theory is still ahead of experiment,
we outline recent advances that have led to the first chemical calculations on
small quantum information processors.Comment: 27 pages. Submitted to Ann. Rev. Phys. Che
