Google achieves Quantum Supremacy, solves 10,000-year problem in 200 seconds

Tech giant Google announced a major breakthrough in quantum computing research. The company’s Sycamore – an experimental quantum processor – has achieved Quantum Supremacy.

To put it simply, Google’s quantum computer took around 200 seconds – a little over three minutes – to solve a complex computation that would have taken a supercomputer about 10,000 years to accomplish.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai informed this on the company’s official blog.

Last month, a paper by Google AI scientists was leaked on a NASA website, claiming that their quantum computer had demonstrated “quantum supremacy.” It soon disappeared from the site.

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On Wednesday, Nature.com published an article ‘Hello quantum world! Google publishes landmark quantum supremacy claim’ and Google officially claimed the feat on its blog and Twitter.

Quantum supremacy is witnessed as a major milestone since it successfully proves that quantum computers can outperform classical computers.

“Excited about what quantum computing means for the future – it gives us another way to speak the language of the universe and better understand the world, not just in 1s and 0s but in all of its states: beautiful, complex, and with limitless possibility,” Pichai wrote in another tweet.

Calling it a “Hello World” moment, Pichai compared the feat with “building the first rocket that successfully left Earth’s gravity to touch the edge of space.”

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“In many ways, the exercise of building a quantum computer is one long lesson in everything we don’t yet understand about the world around us. While the universe operates fundamentally at a quantum level, human beings don’t experience it that way. In fact many principles of quantum mechanics directly contradict our surface level observations about nature. Yet the properties of quantum mechanics hold enormous potential for computing,” Pichai added.


IBM, Google’s rival in quantum computers, has cast doubts on the claim.

In a blog post, IBM said, “We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity.”

“Google’s experiment is an excellent demonstration of the progress in superconducting-based quantum computing, showing state-of-the-art gate fidelities on a 53-qubit device, but it should not be viewed as proof that quantum computers are ‘supreme’ over classical computers,” it added.

Google’s claim is yet to be reviewed by peers.

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