SCIENTISTS ‘HAVE ACHIEVED QUANTUM SUPREMACY’, IN DISCOVERY THAT COULD CHANGE THE

WORLD

‘We are only one creative algorithm away from valuable near-term applications’

Scientists claim to have achieved “quantum supremacy”, a breakthrough that could change the course

of computing history.

Google researchers say they have broken through the milestone, meaning that a quantum computer has

undertaken an operation that classical computers cannot.

Quantum supremacy marks the first step in a field that researchers claim could go on to change the

world. Quantum computers are theoretically capable of doing work much quicker than the computers

we use today.

IBM researchers have already criticised Google’s claims of a breakthrough, suggesting that the new

discovery is not as profound as promised. But the new research has finally been published in the journal

Nature, and lays out the workings of the long-rumoured breakthrough.

The Google researchers state in the paper that their computer, known as Sycamore, is able to conduct a

task in 200 seconds that would take around 10,000 years on a traditional system.

“This dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realisation

of quantum supremacy for this specific computational task, heralding a much-anticipated computing

paradigm,” the researchers write in the paper.

‘Quantum apocalypse’: How super computers could cripple governments

The task used by Google researchers to test their system is largely useless for now, and its main function

is to generate random numbers. But it is the first time that any task of this kind has ever been successfully

demonstrated, and could very soon lead to more practical applications, the researchers claim.
“As a result of these developments, quantum computing is transitioning from a research topic to a

technology that unlocks new computational capabilities,” the researchers conclude. “We are only one

creative algorithm away from valuable near-term applications.”

The company now hopes to build a system that can conduct more broad operations, which could be

used across a variety of different fields.

“Such a device promises a number of valuable applications,” the researchers wrote in a blog post. “For

example, we can envision quantum computing helping to design new materials – lightweight batteries

for cars and airplanes, new catalysts that can produce fertilizer more efficiently (a process that today

produces over 2 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions), and more effective medicines.

“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’s breakthrough had been rumoured since an early version of the paper was leaked online last

month.

It had already been criticised by IBM, who argued that the paper was fundamentally flawed because

Google had drastically overestimated the difficulty of the task and how long it would take on a classical

computer. The task would actually take about 2.5 days on a classical computer and would be completed

more effectively than it was with Google’s quantum computer, the firm argued in a blog post published

two days before the Nature paper was made available, though it is yet to demonstrate the claim.

The phrase “quantum supremacy” has also attracted criticism, both for its similarity to white supremacy

and the fact it could encourage hyped-up reporting on the status of quantum technology. Both of those

arguments were addressed by John Preskill, the scientist who coined the phrase in 2012, in a recent article

where he concluded that Google’s breakthrough is nonetheless very significant.

QUANTUM SUPREMACY: HOW DOES IT ACTUALLY WORK AND WHAT IS THE SYCAMORE COMPUTER

THAT'S LED TO HUGE NEW BREAKTHROUGH?

Scientists have finally claimed to reach quantum supremacy, a landmark in an industry that could change

the world.

But the announcement has been wrapped in confusion and controversy. Though quantum computing

could bring profound new processing power to the world, it is also incredibly complicated both to

understand and to test.

The milestone is revealed in a new paper that has been long-rumoured but is now finally published in

the prestigious journal Nature. And the world is finally scrutinising what exactly Google means by

quantum supremacy, whether its claim stand up – and what happens now.

Here is everything you need to know about the breakthrough.

What is quantum supremacy?

The phrase, first coined in 2012, refers to something very specific but a little complicated to define. It is

the moment at which a quantum computer is able to do something that a classical computer could not.

Reaching that point would be significant because it would seem to prove the promise that scientists have

been making for decades: that an entirely new kind of computer could be created that would allow for

wholly fresh – and vastly improved – ways of dealing with data. That, in turn, could revolutionise the

world.

But it is important to note that it is also only a milestone: the real journey is much longer, and there is an

awful lot left to do. Scientists are excited about the possibility of achieving quantum supremacy because

of what it means about the process of creating really useful quantum computers, not necessarily as an

end in itself.

The phrase is also disputed for many reasons. Researchers including John Preskill, who first coined the

phrase, have noted that it can give unnecessary hype around our understanding of quantum computers,

and that it has an unfortunate echo of white supremacy.

What's more, the very importance of the test is disputed, too. That's in part because it is difficult to say

exactly when quantum supremacy has been reached, because researchers could discover that any given

process was actually possible to complete on a classical computer all along.

How does quantum computing work?

To understand how a quantum computer works, it's important first to understand how a traditional one

works. Everything from the phone in your pocket to the computer in your desk – and all the other places

that computers appear – do so using the paradigm of classic computing, which has stayed strong for

years but which quantum computers could compete with, if not displace.

In a traditional computer, everything in the memory is represented as a series of bits, which work as a

binary system: they are either 1 or 0, on or off. Those bits can be assembled into the vast and complex

information processing systems that we use every day, by stringing them together and analysing the

data they together represent.

A quantum computer works instead with qubits, not bits – they are no longer binary, but instead can be

in a number of different states. By exploiting the unusual behaviour described in quantum mechanics,

scientists are able to build quantum computers, which operate at that more complex and therefore more

powerful level.

Just as in a traditional computer, those qubits can be assembled into a system and used to carry out

operations. In a quantum computer, that is made up of a series of quantum gates, which can in turn be

assembled into a quantum circuit.

That – or a vastly longer, almost impossibly more complex version of that – is how we get to a quantum

computer, which is able to exploit those various strange phenomena and use them to run operations.

Theoretically, those quantum computers and their entirely new paradigm should allow scientists to

conduct those operations more quickly and in new ways. It's that which leads us to quantum superiority

– and to the variety of other possibilities that lie after it.

What is Google's 'Sycamore'?

Google's great achievement – and it is certainly not the only company to try – is to boil down that

complexity into a functioning quantum computer. The successful chip wasn't the first of Google's

experiments, and there are more likely to come or probably already being used already, but it is the one

that will go down in history as perhaps achieving the first great landmark in quantum computing.

The Sycamore chip is a 54-qubit processor. That is relatively limited, and is one of the many reasons that

the discovery is not practically useful – researchers want a 100-qubit or even 200-qubit system before

they are really able to put it to the test, and see whether the dreams of quantum computing are realised.

But the big breakthrough is just how high-fidelity and fast the gates that make up the computer are.

Scientists have lauded the precision with which the system works, and it is that which allowed Google to

make its announcement.

The actual process that it did to prove its quantum supremacy was relatively simple in output: it just gave

out random numbers. But it was the workings behind it that were such a breakthrough, since it used an

algorithm that would take 10,000 years to give a similar output on a classical computer, but only 200

seconds on Google's Sycamore.

On “Quantum Supremacy”

Quantum computers are starting to approach the limit of classical simulation and it is important that we

continue to benchmark progress and to ask how difficult they are to simulate. This is a fascinating

scientific question.

Recent advances in quantum computing have resulted in two 53-qubit processors: one from our group

in IBM and a device described by Google in a paper published in the journal Nature. In the paper, it is

argued that their device reached “quantum supremacy” and that “a state-of-the-art supercomputer

would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task.” We argue that an ideal

simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater

fidelity. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements

the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced.

Because the original meaning of the term “quantum supremacy,” as proposed by John Preskill in 2012,

was to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, this

threshold has not been met.

This particular notion of “quantum supremacy” is based on executing a random quantum circuit of a size

infeasible for simulation with any available classical computer. Specifically, the paper shows a

computational experiment over a 53-qubit quantum processor that implements an impressively large

two-qubit gate quantum circuit of depth 20, with 430 two-qubit and 1,113 single-qubit gates, and with

predicted total fidelity of 0.2%. Their classical simulation estimate of 10,000 years is based on the

observation that the RAM memory requirement to store the full state vector in a Schrödinger-type

simulation would be prohibitive, and thus one needs to resort to a Schrödinger-Feynman simulation that

trades off space for time.

The concept of “quantum supremacy” showcases the resources unique to quantum computers, such as

direct access to entanglement and superposition. However, classical computers have resources of their

own such as a hierarchy of memories and high-precision computations in hardware, various software

assets, and a vast knowledge base of algorithms, and it is important to leverage all such capabilities when

comparing quantum to classical.

When their comparison to classical was made, they relied on an advanced simulation that leverages

parallelism, fast and error-free computation, and large aggregate RAM, but failed to fully account for

plentiful disk storage. In contrast, our Schrödinger-style classical simulation approach uses both RAM

and hard drive space to store and manipulate the state vector. Performance-enhancing techniques

employed by our simulation methodology include circuit partitioning, tensor contraction deferral, gate

aggregation and batching, careful orchestration of collective communication, and well-known

optimization methods such as cache-blocking and double-buffering in order to overlap the

communication transpiring between and computation taking place on the CPU and GPU components of

the hybrid nodes. Further details may be found in Leveraging Secondary Storage to Simulate Deep 54-

qubit Sycamore Circuits.

Figure 1. Analysis of expected classical computing runtime vs circuit depth of “Google Sycamore Circuits”.

The bottom (blue) line estimates the classical runtime for a 53-qubit processor (2.5 days for a circuit

depth 20), and the upper line (orange) does so for a 54-qubit processor.

Figure 1. Analysis of expected classical computing runtime vs circuit depth of “Google Sycamore Circuits”.

The bottom (blue) line estimates the classical runtime for a 53-qubit processor (2.5 days for a circuit

depth 20), and the upper line (orange) does so for a 54-qubit processor.

Our simulation approach features a number of nice properties that do not directly transfer from the

classical to quantum worlds. For instance, once computed classically, the full state vector can be accessed

arbitrarily many times. The runtime of our simulation method scales approximately linearly with the circuit

depth (see Figure 1 above), imposing no limits such as those owing to the limited coherence times. New

and better classical hardware, code optimizations to more efficiently utilize the classical hardware, not to

mention the potential of leveraging GPU-direct communications to run the kind of supremacy

simulations of interest, could substantially accelerate our simulation.

Building quantum systems is a feat of science and engineering and benchmarking them is a formidable

challenge. Google’s experiment is an excellent demonstration of the progress in superconducting-based

quantum computing, showing state-of-the-art gate fidelities on a 53-qubit device, but it should not be

viewed as proof that quantum computers are “supreme” over classical computers.

It is well known in the quantum community that we at IBM are concerned of where the term “quantum

supremacy” has gone. The origins of the term, including both a reasoned defense and a candid reflection

on some of its controversial dimensions, were recently discussed by John Preskill in a thoughtful article

in Quanta Magazine. Professor Preskill summarized the two main objections to the term that have arisen

from the community by explaining that the “word exacerbates the already overhyped reporting on the

status of quantum technology” and that “through its association with white supremacy, evokes a

repugnant political stance.”

Both are sensible objections. And we would further add that the “supremacy” term is being

misunderstood by nearly all (outside of the rarified world of quantum computing experts that can put it

in the appropriate context). A headline that includes some variation of “Quantum Supremacy Achieved”

is almost irresistible to print, but it will inevitably mislead the general public. First because, as we argue
above, by its strictest definition the goal has not been met. But more fundamentally, because quantum

computers will never reign “supreme” over classical computers, but will rather work in concert with them,

since each have their unique strengths.

For the reasons stated above, and since we already have ample evidence that the term “quantum

supremacy” is being broadly misinterpreted and causing ever growing amounts of confusion, we urge

the community to treat claims that, for the first time, a quantum computer did something that a classical

computer cannot with a large dose of skepticism due to the complicated nature of benchmarking an

appropriate metric.

For quantum to positively impact society, the task ahead is to continue to build and make widely

accessible ever more powerful programmable quantum computing systems that can implement,

reproducibly and reliably, a broad array of quantum demonstrations, algorithms and programs. This is

the only path forward for practical solutions to be realized in quantum computers.

A final thought. The concept of quantum computing is inspiring a whole new generation of scientists,

including physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, to fundamentally change the landscape of

information technology. If you are already pushing the frontiers of quantum computing forward, let’s

keep the momentum going. And if you are new to the field, come and join the community. Go ahead

and run your first program on a real quantum computer today.

The best is yet to come.

Chief Architect for IBM Q Dmitri Maslov also contributed to this article.