But how was anyone to know if this output was correct, and if quantum supremacy really had been achieved? It’s impossible to use a traditional supercomputer to check the math – the whole point of this milestone is that a quantum processor has done something no other machine can do. Google’s quantum computer was able to take these random circuits and get results, reaching this benchmark. At a certain point, even with all the tricks NASA’s quantum computing and supercomputing experts threw at it, this simulated “computer within a computer” wasn’t able to handle the random circuits given to it – and that became the bar set for Google’s quantum computer to beat. To find that limit, researchers at Ames advanced techniques for simulating these random quantum circuit computations using NASA’s supercomputing facilities. That’s as close as you can get to an impossible task – making it the perfect test for quantum supremacy.īoth the quantum processor and supercomputer were given increasingly complex and random circuits to compute until the supercomputer wasn’t able to process them. You’d need more units of data than there are atoms in the universe. Getting results from a random quantum circuit is difficult without a quantum processor, and theory suggests it may be impossible for tasks beyond a certain size, even on the largest imaginable supercomputer. The test itself involved running random quantum circuits on quantum processors as well as traditional supercomputers. Computations on a quantum computer are called “quantum circuits.” These computer science abstractions work like programs, specifying a series of operations for the quantum processor to run. The paper describes the experiments run by Google’s Sycamore quantum processor to demonstrate quantum supremacy. “And even though that one thing isn’t terribly useful, that it has been done at all is groundbreaking.” “Achieving quantum supremacy means we’ve been able to do one thing faster, not everything faster,” said Eleanor Rieffel, co-author on the paper on this result, published today in Nature, and the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Lead at Ames. This milestone is the first step toward that future. Potentially, NASA could one day use these techniques to support space missions, with quantum optimization making mission schedules more efficient and quantum simulation supporting the design of light and robust materials for modern spacecraft – just to name a few applications. Quantum computing is the study of how to harness the unique properties of quantum mechanics to solve certain types of problems far faster than on traditional computers. “Our missions in the decades to come to the Moon, Mars and beyond are all fueled by innovations like this one.” “Quantum computing is still in its infancy, but this transformative achievement rockets us forward,” said Eugene Tu, center director at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Google, in partnership with NASA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has demonstrated the ability to compute in seconds what would take even the largest and most advanced supercomputers thousands of years, achieving a milestone known as quantum supremacy.
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