
Scientists claimed Wednesday to have achieved a near-mythical state of computing in which a new generation of machine vastly outperforms the world’s fastest super-computer, known as “quantum supremacy”.
A team of experts working on Google’s Sycamore machine said their quantum system had executed a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken a classic computer 10,000 years to complete.
A rival team at IBM has already expressed scepticism about their claim.
But if verified and harnessed, the Google device could make even the world’s most powerful supercomputers—capable of performing a giddying 20,000 trillion calculations per second—look like an early 2000s flip-phone.
Regular computers, even the fastest known to man, function in binary fashion: they carry out tasks using tiny fragments of data known as bits that are only ever either 1 or 0.
Fragments of data on a quantum computer, however, can be both 1 and 0 at the same time, harnessing some of the most mind-boggling powers of quantum mechanics to create exponentially larger amounts of information.
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