Is entanglement really crucial to a quantum computer?

Is entanglement really crucial to a quantum computer?

In this video I describe my PhD research in quantum computing. Is entanglement really crucial to a quantum computer? The standard wisdom says yes but I wasn’t so sure.

Here are a few citations:

2:20​ I claimed that entanglement has been shown to cause a small (polynomial time) improvement in quantum computing in a particular circumstance. That was shown in an amazing paper that used Bell inequalities to prove you the fact: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00690

2:45​ On the role of entanglement in the quantum-computational speed up: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0201143