BristleconePhoto: Google AI Blog
A Google researcher’s paper claiming to have achieved quantum supremacy, a major early milestone in the field of quantum computing, appeared on a NASA website this week before being removed, the Financial Times reports.
Google, as well as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and other large tech companies and startups, have been working to build quantum computers, a new kind of computer based on an entirely different architecture than classical computers. Though this announcement is not official, scientists and industry experts have long expected Google to build a quantum computer capable of reaching this milestone—a quantum computer performing a calculation that a classical computer can’t.
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You can read our primer on quantum computers here and our primer on quantum supremacy here. But the gist is, classical computers are systems where problems are abstracted onto a system of two-position switches called bits (ones and zeros) that interact through the rules of logic. Quantum computers are instead based on quantum bits, or qubits, that are also two-position switches, but they interact via the same rules that subatomic particles follow, called quantum mechanics.
This quantum architecture purportedly could allow quantum computers to solve a set of problems that classical computers can’t in a reasonable amount of time—this includes problems in cryptography as well as modeling molecules. But the di ..
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