Thursday, January 4, 2018

Google promises quantum supremacy in 2018

NewScientist reports:
If all goes to plan in 2018, Google will unveil a device capable of performing calculations that no other computer on the planet can tackle. The quantum computing era is upon us.

Well, sort of. Google is set to achieve quantum supremacy, the long-awaited first demonstration of quantum computers’ ability to outperform ordinary machines at certain tasks. Regular computing bits can be in one of two states: 0 or 1. Their quantum cousins, qubits, get a performance boost by storing a mixture of both states at the same time.

Google’s planned device has just 49 qubits – hardly enough to threaten the world’s high-speed supercomputers. But the tech giant has stacked the deck heavily in its favour, choosing to attack a problem involving simulating the behaviour of random quantum objects – a significant home advantage for a quantum machine.

This task is useless. Solving it won’t build better AI, ...
Google promised quantum supremacy in 2017. Now it is 2018.

If we hear this every year for the next five years, will anyone finally agree that I am right to be skeptical?

1 comment:

  1. Roger, don't you know that you can't use the terminology "Quantum Supremacy" anymore? https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06768

    ReplyDelete