The Washington Post:
For the first time, a machine that runs on the mind-boggling physics of quantum mechanics has reportedly solved a problem that would stump the world’s top supercomputers — a breakthrough known as “quantum supremacy.”
If validated, the report by Google’s AI Quantum team constitutes a major leap for quantum computing, a technology that relies on the bizarre behavior of tiny particles to encode huge amounts of information. According to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Google’s Sycamore processor performed in less than three and a half minutes a calculation that would take the most powerful classical computer on the planet 10,000 years to complete.
The achievement has been compared to the Wright brothers’ 12-second first flight at Kitty Hawk — an early, aspirational glimpse at a revolution to come. By providing exponentially greater calculation power than the machines we use today, quantum computers could one day transform the way we communicate ideas, conceal data and comprehend the universe.
The result is also a feather in the cap for both Google and the United States because quantum technology is expected to confer huge economic and national security advantages to whoever can master it first.
The technology community has been abuzz about the breakthrough ever since a leaked version of the study was published on (and then removed from) a NASA website last month. Writing in the magazine Quanta, Caltech theoretical physicist John Preskill called the result “a remarkable achievement in experimental physics and a testament to the brisk pace of progress in quantum computing hardware.”
But the claim has also prompted skepticism from competitors. Researchers at IBM, which has been working on its own quantum machines, argued in a blog post this week that a classical computer system would in fact take two and a half days to perform the calculation in Google’s report — and would make fewer mistakes in the process. The IBM scientists also questioned the use of the James Bond-esque term “quantum supremacy,” which seems to imply that classical computers are about to become obsolete.
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