What’s the Deal with Google’s Quantum Supremacy?

Google is an amazing company that comes up with many interesting things. I have no doubt about that. This time, quite a few people have asked me what I think about their quantum supremacy, billion times faster computers, and so on. To avoid having to respond repeatedly via email, here’s my quick summary for everyone:

1. Quantum computers have been developed by several major companies for quite some time now. Therefore, I see this more as a partial success rather than a breakthrough.

2. This involved only 53 qubits with 86 connections. For use in cryptography or even for setting the weights of a robust neural network, many, many more would be needed. Here, we must wait for quantum Moore's Law. Furthermore, Google claimed back in 2013 that it was working with D-Wave, which has 512 qubits. The D-Wave from 2017 is said to have 2048 qubits, and so on.

3. The test they managed on the quantum computer in 200 seconds would supposedly take the most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years to solve. That seems rather dubious to me. It’s likely a contrived problem specifically designed for this computer, and it’s probably possible to optimise this problem so that it wouldn’t take nearly as long on supercomputers (according to IBM, for example, 2.5 days instead of 10,000 years – that’s 1.5 million times shorter than what Google is promoting). It would be much more interesting if they were solving problems like factorisation into prime numbers.

What’s your opinion on quantum computers?

Sources: https://www.zive.cz/…/google-dos…/sc-3-a-200869/default.aspx#

Course 1: https://www.udemy.com/…/qc101-introduction-to-quantum-comp…/

Course 2: https://www.udemy.com/course/quantum-computing-an-overview/