  In this Letter we show that an arbitrarily good approximation to the
propagator e^{itH} for a 1D lattice of n quantum spins with hamiltonian H may
be obtained with polynomial computational resources in n and the error
\epsilon, and exponential resources in |t|. Our proof makes use of the finitely
correlated state/matrix product state formalism exploited by numerical
renormalisation group algorithms like the density matrix renormalisation group.
There are two immediate consequences of this result. The first is that the
Vidal's time-dependent density matrix renormalisation group will require only
polynomial resources to simulate 1D quantum spin systems for logarithmic |t|.
The second consequence is that continuous-time 1D quantum circuits with
logarithmic |t| can be simulated efficiently on a classical computer, despite
the fact that, after discretisation, such circuits are of polynomial depth.
