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Google Takes Aim at Quantum Supremacy with 72-Qubit Chip
Google's Quantum AI Lab has revealed it is testing a 72-qubit quantum processor in its bid to become the first company to demonstrate quantum supremacy.
The chip, known as Bristlecone, was revealed on Monday at the annual American Physical Society meeting in Los Angeles. Given that you only need 49 or 50 qubits to demonstrate quantum supremacy – the capability of a quantum computer to outperform the largest supercomputers on certain computational tasks – a 72-qubit processor should be more than enough to achieve such a milestone. However, the error rates of such a system must be low enough so that it to be of practical use. Moreover, the ability to test a system for quantum supremacy is confounded by the very fact that classical computers cannot be used to compare test results.
Julian Kelly, a research scientist at the Quantum AI Lab who presented Bristlecone at this week's American Physical Society meeting, described the progress of their work in a Google Research blog post. In his writeup, he characterized the new chip as a "a testbed for research into system error rates and scalability of our qubit technology, as well as applications in quantum simulation, optimization, and machine learning."
Also at BGR.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 07 2018, @12:35PM (2 children)
That's an absolutely irrelevant question, Richard Spencer wouldn't even bother with this kind of supremacy.
(grin)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday March 07 2018, @05:16PM
Bourne, White, Quantum ... All that talk of supremacy, and for what?
Can't we just get along, and just split the tasks based on effectiveness and availability? It would be so much cleaner and simpler. You compute this, you compute that. You kill this, I kill that. You drink here, I drink there. You break crypto, I do weather. You take down supranational threats, I nuke egocentric men. You ride at the back, I ride at the front. Easy peaceful life, like when men and women stick to their roles in the household!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday March 07 2018, @07:10PM
"Quantum Supremacy" is useful for PR purposes, but worthless as an objective target. Generally it demonstrated on a test that's entirely useless, but which is designed to give quantum computers a maximal advantage over classical computers.
What's useful is what you can do with it. It *ought* to be useful for simulating atomic interactions in small molecules. In that kind of test the question would be "What's the largest molecular interaction it can simulate in (specify a time period)?".
OTOH, I have strong doubts as to the general utility of quantum computers until they design one that can run at standard temperature and pressure. (Or at least liquid Nitrogen.) Until then they will necessarily be limited to centralized locations. I'd also say limited to specialized problems, but remote access will enable them to deal with a large number of problems if algorithms can be found that are more efficiently solved via quantum computing...and enough more efficiently to justify the increased cost. Currently all I can think of are cryptography and molecular modeling. (Not that those are small areas.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.