Google announces breakthrough in quantum computing research

On October 23, Sundar Pichai took to Twitter to announce the GoogleAI team's most recent breakthrough in quantum computing research, details of which have been published by the scientific journal Nature.

Very proud that our @GoogleAI team has achieved a big breakthrough in quantum computing known as quantum supremacy after over a decade of work, as published in @Nature. Thank you to our collaborators in the research community who helped make this possible.https://t.co/yZUUbZsyA0

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) October 23, 2019

Google said that an experimental quantum processor had completed a calculation in just a few minutes, something that would otherwise take any traditional supercomputer thousands of years.

The announcement by the tech giant was published in Nature on October 23. Findings of the experiment which were also published in the journal highlight that "quantum speedup is achievable in a real-world system and is not precluded by any hidden physical laws," the researchers wrote.

"Quantum computing will be a great complement to the work we do (and will continue to do) on classical computers," Sundar Pichai said in a blog.

"In many ways quantum brings computing full circle, giving us another way to speak the language of the universe and understand the world and humanity not just in 1s and 0s but in all of its states: beautiful, complex, and with limitless possibility," the Google CEO added.

Quantum computing is a nascent and somewhat bewildering technology for vastly sped-up information processing. Quantum computers might one day revolutionize tasks that would take existing computers years, including the hunt for new drugs and optimizing city and transportation planning.

The technique relies on quantum bits, or qubits, which can register data values of zero and one — the language of modern computing — simultaneously. Big tech companies including Google, Microsoft, IBM and Intel are avidly pursuing the technology.

Google's findings, however, are already facing pushback from other industry researchers. A version of Google's paper leaked online last month and researchers caught a glimpse before it was taken down.

IBM quickly took issue with Google's claim that it had achieved "quantum supremacy," a term that refers to a point when a quantum computer can perform a calculation that a traditional computer can't complete within its lifetime.

Google's leaked paper showed that its quantum processor, Sycamore, finished a calculation in three minutes and 20 seconds — and that it would take the world's fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to do the same thing.

But IBM researchers say that Google underestimated the conventional supercomputer, called Summit, and said it could actually do the calculation in 2.5 days. Summit was developed by IBM and is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Google has not commented on IBM's claims.

Whether or not Google has achieved "quantum supremacy" or not may matter to competitors, but the semantics could be less important for the field of quantum research. What it does seem to indicate is that the field is maturing.

"The quantum supremacy milestone allegedly achieved by Google is a pivotal step in the quest for practical quantum computers," John Preskill, a Caltech professor who originally coined the "quantum supremacy" term, wrote in a column after the paper was leaked.

It means quantum computing research can enter a new stage, he wrote, though a significant effect on society "may still be decades away."

The calculation employed by Google has little practical use, Preskill wrote, other than to test how well the processor works. Monroe echoed that concern.

"The more interesting milestone will be a useful application," he said.

(With inputs from PTI)