Google Breaks the Quantum Barrier

credit: Google

In a landmark technological achievement, compared by some to the Wright Bros. first powered flight, Google announced today that it achieved "quantum supremacy" using its prototype quantum computer to perform a calculation that would have taken conventional high speed computers 10,000 years to perform in just 3 minutes, 20 seconds.  The company published a paper on its quantum research in the prestigious science journal, Nature.  Scientists have been working toward the possibility of quantum computing since the 1980s, hoping to employ the quantum state of simultaneity for computing purposes.  Conventional computers use digital states of 1 and 0 or bits to perform high speed calculations.  Quantum computers can use quantum mechanical states of both 1 and 0 at the same time, called a qubit.  In order to do this, parts of the computer are frozen to 460 degrees below zero.

The prototype machine is not yet practical, costing millions to build, but researchers are hopeful that like other digital tools it can eventually migrate out of the lab and into useful applications.  Venture capitalists are hopeful too, having invested $450 million into quantum startups.  Both China and the United States consider quantum computing to be a national security priority and have launched billion dollar efforts to fund research.   Quantum computing capability poses severe challenges to successful encryption of data used to protect national and commercial secrets.  IBM disputes Google's claim that the calculation performed by Quantum 1 could not be done on a conventional supercomputer in a reasonable length of time.  It says the performed calculation could run on a conventional computer in two and half days.  Other scientists dismissed the quantum performance as too esoteric to be useful.  But the feat is a start to making quantum computing a commercial reality.