Earlier this month, Google’s quantum computing lab seemed to announce that they had proved “quantum supremacy” before the paper was pulled from public view again. This leak was presumably accidental, as the underlying research has been accepted for publication by Nature, but is still under embargo.
You might also like: An Introduction to Quantum Computing
Quantum What?
For the uninitiated, quantum supremacy is the concrete illustration that a quantum computer can complete a computation that a classical supercomputer cannot achieve (or would take prohibitively long to do). In this case, Google’s researchers used a quantum computer with 53 qubits (hold on if you’re unfamiliar with this term, I’ll explain it shortly) to perform a calculation that took three minutes but would take Summit, the world’s most powerful classical supercomputer, 10,000 years to achieve.