Google claims quantum computing breakthrough

A calculation Google did in minutes would take a super computer 10,000 years. IBM disagrees.

Google’s Sundar Pichai with one of its quantum computers. Picture: AFP

Alphabet’s Google said its quantum computer has performed a calculation in about three minutes compared with the 10,000 years it would have taken the world’s fastest super computer to complete the task.

The calculation involves a progressively difficult random number-sampling task and the research was published in the science journal Nature.

The search giant claims to have achieved so-called quantum supremacy, which Google defines as a programmable quantum computer performing a task that is prohibitively hard for a regular computer. The quantum processor collected one million samples of a quantum circuit in approximately 200 seconds, which would have taken a state-of-the-art super computer an estimated 10,000 years to do.

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Industry experts and competitors have defined that term differently. International Business Machines Corp, for example, argues that the term refers to the threshold where quantum computers can perform calculations that classical computers cannot.

IBM, which is working to commercialise its own quantum computer, saw a version of the Nature paper prior to publication and published a blog post earlier this week disagreeing with the science behind Google’s claim. The calculation could have been solved with a classical machine in two and a half days instead of 10,000 years, IBM said.

Experts say quantum computing can be orders of magnitude more powerful than traditional computers.

By harnessing the properties of quantum physics, quantum computers have the potential to sort through a vast number of possibilities in nearly real time and come up with a probable solution. While traditional computers store information as either 0s or 1s, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which represent and store information as both zeros and ones simultaneously.

Google’s quantum computer is a 54-qubit processor named Sycamore.

Experts say quantum computing can be applied across industries, including pharmaceuticals, finance and transportation. Companies including JPMorgan Chase & Co and Volkswagen have been experimenting with early versions of quantum computers.

Google’s demonstration of quantum computing’s processing power comes as competitors such as Microsoft Corp. and IBM, and venture capital-backed start-ups, are working to commercialise the technology using various methods.

President Donald Trump’s administration has made quantum computing a priority and authorised the spending of $US1.2 billion over five years for quantum-related activities across the federal government.

Google’s quantum researchers have been working for years to solve two major technical problems to commercialise quantum computing. One is that qubits can’t yet maintain their quantum mechanical state for more than a fraction of a second, in part because they are delicate and easily disrupted by changes in temperature, noise or frequency.

Another challenge is that current quantum-computing systems don’t have fault tolerance like traditional computers, meaning if the delicate qubits are disturbed they can’t resume or continue running the program they were handling.

Wall Street Journal