Many of the world’s toughest scientific challenges, like developing high-temperature superconductors and understanding the true nature of space and time, involve dealing with the complexity of quantum systems. What makes these challenges difficult is that the number of quantum states in these systems is exponentially large, making brute-force computation infeasible. To deal with this, data structures called tensor networks are used. Tensor networks let one focus on the quantum states that are most relevant for real-world problems—the states of low energy, say—while ignoring other states that aren’t relevant. Tensor networks are also increasingly finding applications in machine learning (ML). However, there remain difficulties that prohibit them from widespread use in the ML community: 1) a production-level tensor network library for accelerated hardware has not been available to run tensor network algorithms at scale, and 2) most of the tensor network literature is geared toward physics applications and creates the false impression that expertise in quantum mechanics is required to understand the algorithms.

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