EDITOR'S PICK3,228 viewsSep 27, 2019, 03:00pm

Has Google Actually Achieved 'Quantum

Supremacy' With Its New Quantum
Computer?
Ethan Siegel Senior Contributor
Starts With A BangContributor Group
Science
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Shown here is one component of a quantum computer (a dilution refrigerator), as shown

here in a... [+]
GETTY

Earlier this month, a new story leaked out: Google, one of the leading companies invested in the
endeavor of quantum computing, claims to have just achieved Quantum Supremacy. While our
classical computers ⁠— like laptops, smartphones and even modern supercomputers ⁠— are
extraordinarily powerful, there are many scientific questions whose complexity goes far beyond
their brute-force capabilities to calculate or simulate.

But if we could build a powerful enough quantum computer, ⁠it's possible that many problems that
are impractical to solve with a classical computer would suddenly be solvable with a quantum
computer. This idea, that quantum computers could efficiently solve a computation that a classical
computer can only solve inefficiently, is known as Quantum Supremacy. Has Google actually done
that? Let's dive into the problem and find out.

The way solid-state storage devices work today is by the presence or absence of charged
particles... [+]
E. SIEGEL / TREKNOLOGY
Today In: Innovation

The idea of a classical computer is simple, and goes back to Alan Turing and the concept of a
Turing machine. With information encoded into bits (i.e., 0s and 1s), you can apply a series of
operations (such as AND, OR, NOT, etc.) to those bits to perform any arbitrary computations you
like. Some of those computations might be easy; others might be hard; it depends on the problem.
But, in theory, if you can design an algorithm to successfully perform a computation, no matter how
computationally expensive it is, you can program it into a classical computer.

However, a quantum computer is a little bit different. Instead of regular bits, which are always
either 0 or 1, a quantum computer uses qubits, or the quantum analog of bits. As with most things,
going to the quantum world from the classical world means we need to change how we view this
particular physical system.

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This ion trap, whose design is largely based on the work of Wolfgang Paul, is one of the
early... [+]
MNOLF / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Instead of recording a 0 or 1 permanently as a bit, a qubit is a two-state quantum mechanical

system, where the ground state represents 0 and the excited state represents 1. (For example, an
electron can be spin up or spin down; a photon can be left-handed or right-handed in its
polarization, etc.) When you prepare your system initally, as well as when you read out the final
results, you'll see only 0s and 1s for the values of qubits, just like with a classical computer and
classical bits.

But unlike a classical computer, when you're actually performing these computational operations,
the qubit isn't in a determinate state, but rather lives in a superposition of 0s and 1s: similar to the
simultaneously part-dead and part-alive Schrodinger's cat. It's only when the computations are over,
and you read out your final results, that you measure what the true end-state is.
In a traditional Schrodinger's cat experiment, you do not know whether the outcome of a
quantum... [+]
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER DHATFIELD

There's a big difference between classical computers and quantum computers: prediction,
determinism and probability. As with all quantum mechanical systems, you cannot simply provide
the initial conditions of your system and the algorithm of which operators act on it and then predict
what the final state will be. Instead, you can only predict the probability distribution of what the
final state will look like, and then by performing the critical experiment over and over again can
you hope to match and produce that expected distribution.

You might think that you need a quantum computer to simulate quantum behavior, but that's not
necessarily true. You can simulate quantum behavior on a quantum computer, but you should also
be able to simulate it on a Turing machine: i.e., a classical computer.

Computer programs with enough computational power behind them can brute-force
analyze a candidate... [+]
C++ PROGRAM ORIGINALLY FROM PROGANSWER.COM

This is one of the most important ideas in all of computer science: the Church-Turing thesis. It
states that if a problem can be solved by a Turing machine, it can also be solved by a computational
device. That computational device could be a laptop, smartphone, supercomputer or even a quantum
computer; a problem that could be solved by one such device should be solvable on all of them.
This is generally accepted, but it tells you nothing about the speed or efficiency of that computation,
nor about Quantum Supremacy in general.

Instead, there's another step that's much more controversial: the extended Church-Turing thesis.
It states that a Turing machine (like a classical computer) can always efficiently simulate any
computational model, even to simulate an inherently quantum computation. If you could provide a
counterexample to this — if you could demonstrate even one example where quantum computers
were vastly more efficient than a classical computer — that would mean that Quantum Supremacy
has been demonstrated.

IBM's Four Qubit Square Circuit, a pioneering advance in computations, could someday
lead to quantum... [+]
IBM RESEARCH

This is the goal of many teams working independently: to design a quantum computer that can out-
perform a classical computer by a significant margin under at least one reproducible condition. The
key to understanding how this is possible is the following: in a classical computer, you can subject
any bit (or combination of bits) of information to a number of classical operations. This includes
operations you're familiar with, such as AND, OR, NOT, etc.

But if you have a quantum computer, with qubits instead of bits, you'll have a number of purely
quantum operations you can perform in addition to the classical ones. These quantum operations
obey particular rules that could be simulated on a classical computer, but only at great
computational expense. On the other hand, they can be easily simulated by a quantum computer on
one condition: that the time it takes to perform all of your computational operations is short enough
compared to the coherence time of the qubits.
In a quantum computer, qubits that are in an excited state (a "1" state) will decay back to
the... [+]
GETTY

With all this in mind, the Google team had a paper that was briefly posted to NASA's website
(likely an early draft of what the final paper will be) that was later removed, but not before many
scientists had a chance to read and download it. While the implications of their accomplishments
have not yet been fully sorted out, here's how you can imagine what they did.

Imagine you have 5 bits or qubits of information: 0 or 1. They all start in a 0 state, but you prepare a
state where two of these bits/qubits are excited to be in the "1" state. If your bits or qubits are
perfectly controlled, you can prepare that state explicitly. For example, you can excite bit/qubit
numbers 1 and 3, in which case your system's physical state will be |10100>. You can then "pulse
in" random operations to act on these bits/qubits, and you expect that what you'll get is a specific
probability distribution for the outcome.
A 9-qubit quantum circuit, as micrographed out and labeled. Gray regions are aluminum,
dark regions... [+]
C. NEILL ET AL. (2017), ARXIV:1709.06678V1, QUANT-PH

The Google team chose a particular protocol for their experiment attempting to achieve Quantum
Supremacy, demanding that the total number of excited bits/qubits (or the number of 1s) must be
preserved after the application of an arbitrary number of operations. These operations are
completely random, meaning that which bits/qubits are excited (1) or in the ground state (0) are free
to vary; you'd need two "1" states and three "0" states for the five qubit examples. If you didn't have
truly random operations, and if you didn't have the purely quantum operations encoded in your
computer, you'd expect that all 10 of the possible final states would appear with equal probability.

(The ten possibilities are |11000>, |10100>, |10010>, |10001>, |01100>, |01010>, |01001>, |00110>,
|00101>, and |00011>.)

But if you have a quantum computer that behaves as a true quantum computer, you won't get a flat
distribution. Instead, some states should occur more frequently in a final-state outcome than the
others, and others should be very infrequent. This is a counterintuitive aspect of reality that only
arises from quantum phenomena, and the existence of purely quantum gates. We can simulate this
phenomena classically, but only at great computational cost.
When you perform an experiment on a qubit state that starts off as |10100> and you pass
it... [+]
C. NEILL ET AL. (2017), ARXIV:1709.06678V1, QUANT-PH

If we only applied the allowable classical gates, even with a quantum computer, we wouldn't get the
quantum effect out. Yet we can clearly see that the probability distribution we actually get isn't flat,
but that some possible end states are much more likely than the 10% you'd naively expect, and
some are far less likely. The existence of these ultra-low and ultra-high probability states is a purely
quantum phenomenon, and the odds that you'll get these low-probability and high-probability
outcomes (instead of a flat distribution) is an important signature of quantum behavior.
In the field of quantum computing, the odds of getting at least one final state that exhibits a very
low-probability of appearing should follow a specific probability distribution: the Porter-Thomas
distribution. If your quantum computer was perfect, you could perform as many operations as you
wanted for as long as you wanted, and then read out the outcomes to see if your computer followed
the Porter-Thomas distribution, as expected.

The Porter-Thomas distribution, shown here for 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 qubits, plots probabilities
for... [+]
C. NEILL ET AL. (2017), ARXIV:1709.06678V1, QUANT-PH

Practically, though, quantum computers aren't perfect. Any quantum system, no matter how it's
prepared (the Google team used superconducting qubits, but other quantum computers, using
quantum dots or ion traps, for example, are also possible), will have a coherence time: the amount
of time you can expect a qubit prepared in an excited state (i.e., 1) to remain in that state. Beyond
that time, it should decay back to the ground state, or 0.

This is important, because it requires a finite amount of time to apply a quantum operator to your
system: known as gate time. The gate time must be very short compared to the coherence timescale,
otherwise your state might decay and your final state won't give you the desired outcome. Also, the
more qubits you have, the greater the complexity of your device and the higher the probability of
error-introducing crosstalk between qubits. In order to have an error-free quantum computer, you
must apply all of your quantum gates to the full suite of qubits before the system decoheres.

Superconducting qubits remain stable only for ~50 microseconds. Even with a gate time of ~20
nanoseconds, you can only expect to perform a few dozen computations, at most, before
decoherence ruins your experiment and gives you the dreaded flat distribution, losing the quantum
behavior we sought after so thoroughly.
This idealized five qubit setup, where the initial circuit is prepared with qubits 1 and 3 in
the... [+]
C. NEILL ET AL. (2017), ARXIV:1709.06678V1, QUANT-PH

The problem that the Google scientists solved with their 53-qubit computer was not a useful
problem in any regard. In fact, the setup was specifically engineered to be easy for quantum
computers and computationally very expensive for classical ones. The way they finessed this was to
make a system of n qubits, which requires on the order of 2n bits of memory on a classical computer
to simulate, and to pick operations that are as computationally expensive as possible for a classical
computer.

The original algorithm put forth by a collaboration of scientists, including many on the current
Google team, required a 72-qubit quantum computer to demonstrate Quantum Supremacy. Because
the team couldn't achieve that just yet, they went back to the 53-qubit computer, but replaces an
easy-to-simulate quantum gate (CZ) with another quantum gate: the fSim gate (which is a
combination of the CZ with the iSWAP gate), which is more computationally expensive to simulate
for a classical computer.
Different types of quantum gates exhibit various fidelities (or the percentage of error-free
gates)... [+]
NATURE PHOTONICS, VOLUME 12, PAGES534–539 (2018)

There is a long-shot hope for those who want to preserve the extended Church-Turing thesis:
perhaps with a clever enough computational algorithm, we could lower the computational time for
this problem on a classical computer. It seems unlikely that this is plausible, but it's the one scenario
that could revoke what appears to be the first achievement of Quantum Supremacy.

For now, though, the Google team appears to have achieved Quantum Supremacy for the first time:
by solving this one particular (and probably not practically useful) mathematical problem.
They performed this computational task with a quantum computer in a much faster time than even
the biggest, most powerful (classical) supercomputer in the country could. But achieving
useful Quantum Supremacy would enable us to:

 make high-performance quantum chemistry and quantum physics calculations,

 replace all classical computers with superior quantum computers,

 and to run Shor’s algorithm for arbitrarily large numbers.

Quantum Supremacy may have arrived; useful Quantum Supremacy is still far off from being
achieved. For example, if you wanted to factor a 20-digit semiprime number, Google's quantum
computer cannot solve this problem at all. Your off-the-shelf laptop, however, can do this in
milliseconds.

The Sycamore processor, which is a rectangular array of 54 qubits connected to its four
nearest... [+]
GOOGLE AI QUANTUM AND COLLABORATORS, RETRIEVED FROM NASA
Progress in the world of quantum computing is astounding, and despite the claims of its detractors,
systems with greater numbers of qubits are undoubtedly on the horizon. When successful quantum
error-correction arrives (which will certainly require many more qubits and the necessity of
addressing and solving a number of other issues), we'll be able to extend the coherence timescale
and perform even more in-depth calculations. As the Google team themselves noted,

Our experiment suggests that a model of computation may now be available that violates
[the extended Church-Turing thesis]. We have performed random quantum circuit sampling
in polynomial time with a physically realized quantum processor (with sufficiently low error
rates), yet no efficient method is known to exist for classical computing machinery.

With the creation of the very first programmable quantum computer that can efficiently perform a
calculation on qubits that cannot be efficiently carried out on a classical computer, Quantum
Supremacy has officially arrived. Later this year, the Google team will surely publish this result and
be lauded for their extraordinary accomplishment. But our biggest dreams of quantum computing
are still a long way off. It's more important than ever, if we want to get there, to keep on pushing the
frontiers as fast and far as possible.

The author gives thanks to Riccardo Manenti, Ph.D. in superconducting qubits from Oxford and
scientist at Rigetti Computing, for an incredibly informative interview that made this article
possible Additional resources and information can be found from Quanta Magazine,
the Financial Times, Scott Aaronson, and this 2017 publication.
Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.
Ethan Siegel
I am a Ph.D. astrophysicist, author, and science communicator, who professes
physics and astronomy at various colleges. I have won numerous awards for
science writing s...