Double exponential growth - I think we're here. The number of breakthroughs in designing quantum logic, error correction, and other advances has accelerated this year beyond anything in the last ten.
Google claims quantum supremacy achieved.
fortune.com
The experiment The experiment described in the paper sampled randomly generated numbers produced through a specialized scenario involving quantum phenomena. The researchers said they determined that their quantum computer beat regular computers at the task, which involved calculating the output of certain specialized circuits.
"While our processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of the quantum circuit 1 million times, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task," the researchers said.
Google's quantum computer, dubbed "Sycamore," contained 53-qubits, or "quantum bits," a measure of the machine's potential power. The team scaled back from a 72-qubit device, dubbed "Bristlecone," it had previously designed.
The researchers estimate that performing the same experiment on a Google Cloud server would take 50 trillion hours—too long to be feasible. On the quantum processor, it took only 30 seconds, they said.
"Quantum processors based on superconducting qubits can now perform computations...beyond the reach of the fastest classical supercomputers available today," the researchers write. "To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor." |
