Google has announced that it has achieved quantum supremacy. What does it mean? What are the implications for users?
Quantum supercomputers are still a territory of technology yet to be explored, but Google already claims to have achieved “quantum supremacy.” In a paper published in Nature, and in a post on its official blog, the Mountain View company boasts of the performance achieved by its quantum supercomputer “Sycamore”.
According to Google, Sycamore would have been able to complete in just 200 seconds a series of calculations that the most powerful “normal” computer in the world, namely the Summit created by IBM for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, would take 10,000 years to complete. Told this way it is a crushing victory, as well as being a huge advance for technology and science (which Google, not for nothing, compares to the first flight of the Wright brothers). But how do things really stand? Has Google really become the world leader in computing power? IBM, and many others, are not of this opinion at all.
What are quantum computers
Quantum computers (quantum computers in English), are calculators completely different from those we use every day. Instead of relying on the switching on and off of individual transistors, which are logically equivalent to the 0 and 1 bits, these computers are based on quantum mechanics. Instead of bits they have “qubits”, which can have the value of 0, 1 or a superposition of 0 and 1. In order to work quantum computers need very low temperatures and a code and algorithms completely different from those used on normal computers (even in “super” version).
IBM against Google
A little after the publication of the paper by Google, came the response of IBM. The storied electronics company not only built the Summit, which is the world’s most powerful mainstream computer, but also the IBM Q System One, the first commercial 20-bubit (Google’s Sycamore runs at 53 Qubits) circuit-based quantum computer, launched on the market in January 2019. According to IBM, Google’s claims of supremacy are meaningless, because the incredible achievement was achieved only in a specific and very narrow domain. Said in other words: Google’s victory would have no repercussions on our real life, nor would it help science to move forward. But during an interview with MIT Technology Review Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, responded to IBM: “My answer on this is that quantum supremacy is a technical industry term. People in the industry understand exactly what the milestone we’ve reached means.”