The Financial Times reports that Google briefly published a paper on the NASA website titled “Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor” – which was then taken down (which retrieved a copy before it was taken down). Google’s quantum computer was said to have solved in 3 minutes and 20 seconds a calculation that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer approx. 10,000 years. “To our knowledge this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor,” the paper said
Big moment! Google claims to have reached quantum supremacy, taking 3 mins to do a calculation classical computers would take 10,000 YEARS to do. https://t.co/XjaDpa82XS
— Stephen Foley (@stephenfoley) September 20, 2019
We don’t know exactly what this means because Google posted the announcement of them reaching quantum supremacy and then retracted it. But it likely means they have reached quantum supremacy and it’s a matter of timing for the formal announcement. Even more important in that announcement was the fact that their quantum computer did something in three minutes that would take the world’s most powerful traditional computer 10,000 years to do. This means they are further along in cracking the encryption that makes the internet work than most anyone believed. This means that the quantum crypto break is going to happen sooner than most people predicted, or if you subscribe to the theory that the U.S. government is always ahead of the private sector by a few years, that it’s already happened and we just don’t know about it. Either way there is a before and a now, and we can’t go back. People should be putting this moment on their history-in-the-making calendars.