Quantum computing takes flight

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A programmable quantum computer has been reported to outperform the most powerful conventional computers in a specific task — a milestone in computing comparable in importance to the Wright brothers’ first flights.

By

  1. William D. Oliver

    1. William D. Oliver is in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and of Physics, Research Laboratory for Electronics and Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.

Quantum computers promise to perform certain tasks much faster than ordinary (classical) computers. In essence, a quantum computer carefully orchestrates quantum effects (superposition, entanglement and interference) to explore a huge computational space and ultimately converge on a solution, or solutions, to a problem. If the numbers of quantum bits (qubits) and operations reach even modest levels, carrying out the same task on a state-of-the-art supercomputer becomes intractable on any reasonable timescale — a regime termed quantum computational supremacy1. However, reaching this regime requires a robust quantum processor, because each additional imperfect operation incessantly chips away at overall performance. It has therefore been questioned whether a sufficiently large quantum computer could ever be controlled in practice. But now, in a paper in Nature, Arute et al.2 report quantum supremacy using a 53-qubit processor.

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Nature 574, 487-488 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03173-4

References

  1. Preskill, J. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.5813 (2012).

  2. Arute, F. et al. Nature 574, 505–511 (2019).

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  3. Boixo, S. et al. Nature Phys. 14, 595–600 (2018).

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  4. Bernstein, E. & Vazirani, U. Proc. 25th Annu. Symp. Theory Comput. (ACM, 1993).

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  5. Dyakonov, M. The case against quantum computing. IEEE Spectrum (2018).

  6. Kalai, G. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.02499 (2019).

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