Google has announced that it has achieved a breakthrough in the field of quantum computing that has been documented in the latest issue of the journal Nature. The company announced that it has achieved Quantum Supremacy, a term coined by American theoritical physicist to describe a point where quantum computers can perform any task that can’t be performed by the classical computers.
“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, wrote in a blog post that also detailed their experiment and their findings.
Interestingly, this announcement comes exactly a month after the paper was accidentally leaked online by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which contributed to this reasearch along with the Mountain View, California based tech giant. The paper was taken offline shortly after.
So what all tasks can you perform using this technology? Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai making the announcement wrote that, “With this breakthrough we’re now one step closer to applying quantum computing to-for example-design more efficient batteries, create fertilizer using less energy, and figure out what molecules might make effective medicines.”
Though he admitted that these applications are “still many years away” and that his company was committed to “building the error-corrected quantum computer that will power these discoveries.”
However, Google’s announcement about the quantum breakthrough didn’t come without a tinge of controversy. Reacting to announcement, IBM published a blog post in which it said that Google might have overstated its achievements. “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. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced,” IBM’s Edwin Pednault, John Gunnels and Jay Gambetta wrote in the blog post.
“Because the original meaning of the term “quantum supremacy,” as proposed by John Preskill in 2012, was to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, this threshold has not been met,” they added.
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