In a recently leaked paper project by accident, Google claimed to have achieved "quantum supremacy," but IBM has now publicly questioned these claims in a blog post.
Quantum supremacy is a concept introduced by Caltech Professor John Preskill. To achieve this, a company had to show that a quantum computer could do something that conventional computers could not.
In their blog post, the IBM quantum team said that Google's claim to quantum supremacy was flawed because its Sycamore quantum processor had not yet surpassed the capabilities of conventional computers.
"Because the original meaning of the term 'quantum supremacy', proposed by John Preskill in 2012, was to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that conventional computers cannot, this threshold has not been reached."
Quantum computer vs supercomputer
Google's recently published draft of the online document explained that the company had raised a statistical calculation problem with its own quantum processor prototype called Sycamore and the world's fastest supercomputer called Summit at the Oak Ridge National Lab.
Using the results of the experiment, the newspaper estimated that one of today's supercomputers would take around 10,000 years to do what Sycamore did in 200 seconds.
However, IBM was responsible for the development of Summit and the company claims that the supercomputer could have done the job in two and a half days and perhaps even faster if it had been given more time to perfect the implementation. Although it wouldn't make Summit even faster than Sycamore, in his original definition of quantum supremacy, Preskill had stated that a quantum computer would have to do the impossible for a conventional computer to reach the milestone.
Google is expected to release a peer-reviewed version of its next quantum supremacy document that will be based on its latest Sycamore chip. The recently released IBM document has yet to be peer-reviewed, but the company says it will be soon.
Wiring