Cybersecurity

Quantum supremacy: not a Jason Bourne movie

In a development at the edge of scientific advance and journalistic descriptive capabilities, a group of Google researchers say they have achieved the science fiction-sounding feat known as “quantum supremacy.” In a paper published in Nature, members of Google’s AI Quantum team describe their successful efforts to create a computer that capitalizes on the laws of physics most obviously in play at the subatomic realm. That quantum computer, named Sycamore, “performed the target computation in 200 seconds, and from measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output,” two scientists involved in the experiment—John Martinis, chief scientist quantum hardware, and Sergio Boixo, chief scientist quantum computing theory—wrote on the Google AI Blog.