Google has announced that it has “quantum supremacy” through a scientific publication. According to this information, the quantum computer Google built reaches 53 qubits. This figure of speed and analysis ridicules any home team and most supercomputers.
However, despite the news, IBM also announced this week that it had achieved a record with a team of similar speeds, so it remains to compare the details of both to know who really maintains the hegemony.
This week’s milestones have a more important function than the figures themselves indicate, the demonstration that quantum computers work. Beyond any hypothesis, this sector required a confirmation that seems already given.
In a very short way, qubits are the bits used in quantum computing and maintain the peculiarity that they can be in both states, 0 and 1, simultaneously.
In a practical way to understand the concept, it took Google’s computer 200 seconds to sample an instance of the quantum circuit a million times. It would take a supercomputer about 20,000 years to do the same calculations.
From Google, it is thought that this first step will begin to show high growth from now on, although it is unknown what the ceiling can be and the exact direction to which these investigations point that until recently did not separate from science fiction.
In the case of confirming the quantum supremacy of Google, There’s another aspect that is also pending. That’s how long it will last since if we have proven something in the world of computing is that the records achieved are soon left behind and new ones are created.
The applications of quantum computing are very wide. In fact, thanks to it we can develop encryption procedures much more robust than the current ones; more advanced artificial intelligence algorithms; new synthetic materials that perhaps we cannot even imagine now, and we will also have closer to complex drugs that could help us fight more effectively some of the diseases we are currently facing, among other applications.
Google Quantum supremacy will possibly be a very important step forward on this path, but not all problems are likely to be solved by resorting to quantum computing. Conventional computers will continue to be more efficient in some tasks.
