Google says an advanced computer has achieved “quantum supremacy” for the first time, surpassing the performance of conventional devices.
Google disclosed the results in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The achievement came after more than a decade of work at Google, including the use of its own quantum computing chip, called Sycamore.
“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,” Google researchers said in a blog post about the work.
In classical computers, the unit of information is called a “bit” and can have a value of either 1 or 0. But its equivalent in a quantum system – the qubit (quantum bit) – can be both 1 and 0 at the same time.
This phenomenon opens the door for multiple calculations to be performed simultaneously. But the qubits need to be synchronised using a quantum effect known as entanglement, which Albert Einstein termed “spooky action at a distance.”
