Quantum Supremacy: Has Google Achieved It?
A potential catalyst for quantum computing industry boom.
The scientific community recently woke up intrigued and excited about a paper published online by mistake on the NASA website’s Technical Reports Server. The paper which was later taken down, essentially claimed that Google’s ‘Sycamore’ quantum computer was able to achieve “quantum supremacy” by solving a complex problem in just around three minutes and 20 seconds, compared to the estimated 10,000 years it would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputer, Summit.
Today Google has finally published their results in a blog post and in the Nature journal - if the claims are true then we have just witness the beginning/catalyst for what will be an exciting new era for the computing industry! As an investor, you should also be very excited - though we caution to not fall into the hype just yet!:)
Physicists have been talking about the power of quantum computing for over 30 years, but the questions have always been: will it ever do something useful and is it worth investing in? For such large-scale endeavors it is good engineering practice to formulate decisive short-term goals that demonstrate whether the designs are going in the right direction. So, we devised an experiment as an important milestone to help answer these questions. This experiment, referred to as a quantum supremacy experiment, provided direction for our team to overcome the many technical challenges inherent in quantum systems engineering to make a computer that is both programmable and powerful. To test the total system performance we selected a sensitive computational benchmark that fails if just a single component of the computer is not good enough.
Today we published the results of this quantum supremacy experiment in the Nature article, “Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor”. We developed a new 54-qubit processor, named “Sycamore”, that is comprised of fast, high-fidelity quantum logic gates, in order to perform the benchmark testing. 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.
John Martinis, Chief Scientist Quantum Hardware and Sergio Boixo, Chief Scientist Quantum Computing Theory, Google AI Quantum.
Is There a General Scientific Consensus?
It will be interesting to see if there will be a Scientific consensus about Google’s results or whether there will be counter challenge(s) - for example IBM recently challenged the Google claims on this blog post.
We’ll be collaborating with our parent company Zaiku Group to survey top quantum computing researchers around the world about the Google experiment and share the survey results with our paid newsletter subscribers.