Google Has Achieved ‘Quantum Supremacy.’ Just What the Heck Is That?

Here’s a quick bit of topical multiple choice: What is “quantum supremacy?” a) The next blockbuster film in the James Bond series, coming to theaters in the summer of 2020. b) The greatest name for an expansion sports team in all of history. c) Something just achieved by a computer built by one of the world’s biggest and post powerful companies (Hint: it starts with a G and ends with an oogle) and you should be very afraid. If you answered c, you’re correct — except for the very afraid part. The fact is, quantum supremacy — a term that is burning down the Internet today — is really just an exceedingly fancy way of saying a super-duper kind of computer, one that not only operates on quantum principles, but masters them so deftly that it actually outperforms a traditional computer. (That’s where the “supremacy” part comes from.) Traditional silicon computers like the one you might be using to read this rely on chips that encode data in one of two states: 1 or 0. Gathered up and organized by the millions, billions and trillions, all those 1’s and 0’s take on meaning in the same way that the 8.3 million pixels in a 4K TV screen, or the who-know-how-many dots in a pointillist painting like George Seraut’s masterpiece Sunday on La Grande Jatte, create a picture. But 1’s and 0’s are, by definition, binary things — they are one or the other, but they can’t be both. The quantum...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime Research Source Type: news