Google announces ‘quantum supremacy’ breakthrough

Google disclosed in the journal Nature that it has managed to achieve quantum supremacy. Quantum supremacy is defined as the potential ability of quantum computing devices to solve problems that classical computers cannot.

According to a team of experts working on Google’s Sycamore machine, the quantum system took 200 seconds to work through a calculation that would have taken a classic computer 10,000 years to complete.

“Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds, and from measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output,” Google researchers said in a blog published on 23rd October.

William Oliver, a computer researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote on the discovery, “This demonstration of quantum supremacy over today’s leading classical algorithms on the world’s leading supercomputers is truly a remarkable achievement,”

He went on to compare the breakthrough to the first manned flight taken by the Wright Brothers at the beginning of the 20th Century.

“Their aeroplane wasn’t the first airborne vehicle to fly and it didn’t solve any pressing transport problem,” Oliver wrote.”It is what the event represented, rather than what it practically accomplished that was paramount. And so it is with this first report of quantum computational supremacy.”

Sundar Pichari, Google’s CEO, tweeted that he was “Very proud that our @GoogleAI team has achieved a big breakthrough in quantum computing known as quantum supremacy after over a decade of work, as published in @Nature. Thank you to our collaborators in the research community who helped make this possible.

Very proud that our @GoogleAI team has achieved a big breakthrough in quantum computing known as quantum supremacy after over a decade of work, as published in @Nature. Thank you to our collaborators in the research community who helped make this possible.https://t.co/yZUUbZsyA0

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) October 23, 2019

IBM, however, has questioned Google’s prematurely released results.

“We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity,” IBM researchers wrote.

Intel didn’t offer an opinion but Jim Clarke, Intel Labs’ director of quantum hardware, said “We are committed to moving quantum from the lab to commercialization,”

ALSO READ: OpenAI Robot Solves Rubik’s Cube One-Handed