Google scientists say they have made a breakthrough in quantum computing and published the results of what they believe could be the future of computers.
The company claimed in a Wednesday blog post that it had built a machine that “performed the target computation in 200 seconds” that would “take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output.”
Quantum computing has the potential to be significantly more powerful than classical computing because each additional unit of processing increases the computing power exponentially rather than linearly. Google has called its recent breakthrough “quantum supremacy.”
IBM hit back at Google’s assertion with its own blog post claiming that traditional supercomputers could have performed the same task as Google’s machine “in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity.” They said that Google had not reached “quantum supremacy” because the term is meant “to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t.”
“This threshold has not been met,” they added.
IBM has created its own prototype of a quantum machine that they have made available for the public.
Google said its path forward was to design a “fault-tolerant quantum computer.”
“Achieving the necessary computational capabilities will still require years of hard engineering and scientific work. But we see a path clearly now, and we’re eager to move ahead,” Google said.
