  The continued development of novel many-body approaches to ground-state
problems in physics and chemistry calls for a consistent way to assess its
overall progress. Here we introduce a metric of variational accuracy, the
V-score, obtained from the variational energy and its variance. We provide the
most extensive curated dataset of variational calculations of many-body quantum
systems to date, identifying cases where state-of-the-art numerical approaches
show limited accuracy, and novel algorithms or computational platforms, such as
quantum computing, could provide improved accuracy. The V-score can be used as
a metric to assess the progress of quantum variational methods towards quantum
advantage for ground-state problems, especially in regimes where classical
verifiability is impossible.
