Google first to hit Quantum Supremacy says report

The Financial Times report that Google’s Quantum Computer has been the first to hit Quantum Supremacy, completing a calculation in 3 minutes that would take a conventional supercomputer such as IBM’s Summit 10,000 years.

The news was revealed by a Google research paper which was temporarily posted online last week.

“To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor,” the research paper reportedly said.

Google has been competing with IBM and Microsoft and unveiled a 72-qubit quantum computer chip called Bristlecone in March 2018, but it is not clear if this is the device which achieved the goal.

Quantum Computers have the potential to find solutions in minutes to complex problems such as protein folding which would take thousands of years for regular computers to calculate, but on the dark side would render many encryption schemes, which rely on nearly impossible calculations, completely vulnerable.

See a helpful explainer which predicted the feat earlier this year below:

via CNET