University of Kwazulu-Natal

Quantum Supremacy Explained Big Think

Bonisiwe Shabane
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quantum supremacy explained big think

In our everyday experience, the world is 100% measurable, deterministic, and independent of the observer. The glass is either on the table in an unbroken state, or it’s on the floor in a shattered state, regardless of when or even whether you measure or observe it. The three marbles in your bag are definitively colored red, green, and blue, and no matter how you shake that bag or for how long, the red marble remains red, the green marble remains... And if you look at that quarter that somehow fell onto your nightstand long ago, it will always behave as though either “heads” or “tails” is facing up, never as though it’s part-heads and... But in the quantum Universe, this isn’t necessarily the case. A radioactive atom that remains unobserved will exist in a superposition of “decayed” and “undecayed” states until that critical measurement is made.

The three valence quarks making up your proton may all have a definitive color anytime you measure them, but exactly what color you observe is guaranteed to not be constant over time. And if you shoot many electrons, one-at-a-time, through a double slit and don’t measure which slit it goes through, the pattern you see will indicate that each electron went through both slits simultaneously. This difference, between classical and quantum systems, has resulted in both scientific and technological revolutions. One field that’s only now emerging is quantum computing, carrying the fascinating notion of quantum supremacy along with it, but also spawning a large series of dubious claims and misinformation. Here’s an explainer about quantum supremacy and the current state of quantum computers to help you separate fact from fiction. Let’s start with an idea you’re probably familiar with: the notion of an everyday computer, also known as a classical computer.

Although calculating machines and devices had been around for a long time, well prior to the 20th century, it was Alan Turing who gave us the modern idea of a classical computer in the... The simple version of a Turing machine is that you can encode any type of information you like into bits: or binary (with only two options) components that, for example, could be represented by... You can then apply a series of successive operations to those bits (for example, operations such as “AND,” “OR,” “NOT,” and many more) in the proper order to perform any sort of arbitrary computation... In quantum computing, quantum supremacy or quantum advantage is the goal of demonstrating that a programmable quantum computer can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time,... Conceptually, quantum supremacy involves both the engineering task of building a powerful quantum computer and the computational-complexity-theoretic task of finding a problem that can be solved by that quantum computer and has a superpolynomial... Examples of proposals to demonstrate quantum supremacy include the boson sampling proposal of Aaronson and Arkhipov,[9] and sampling the output of random quantum circuits.[10][11] The output distributions that are obtained by making measurements in...

For this conclusion to be valid, only very mild assumptions in the theory of computational complexity have to be invoked. In this sense, quantum random sampling schemes can have the potential to show quantum supremacy.[12] A notable property of quantum supremacy is that it can be feasibly achieved by near-term quantum computers,[4] since it does not require a quantum computer to perform any useful task[13] or use high-quality quantum... In 1936, Alan Turing published his paper, "On Computable Numbers",[18] in response to the 1900 Hilbert Problems. Turing's paper described what he called a "universal computing machine", which later became known as a Turing machine. In 1980, Paul Benioff used Turing's paper to propose the theoretical feasibility of Quantum Computing.

His paper, "The Computer as a Physical System: A Microscopic Quantum Mechanical Hamiltonian Model of Computers as Represented by Turing Machines",[19] was the first to demonstrate that it is possible to show the reversible... In 1981, Richard Feynman showed that quantum mechanics could not be efficiently simulated on classical devices.[20] During a lecture, he delivered the famous quote, "Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make... We may be on the cusp of quantum supremacy. But what does that actually mean? When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Quantum computers are expected to solve some problems beyond the reach of the most powerful supercomputers imaginable. Reaching this milestone has been dubbed "quantum supremacy." But whether quantum supremacy has been achieved yet and what it would mean for the field remain unsettled. The term "quantum supremacy" was coined in 2012 by John Preskill, a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, to describe the point at which a quantum computer can do something that a classical one... With every passing day, quantum computers are getting closer to being practical computers that can be put to use in various industries and walks of life, but what are scientists and engineers actually aiming... When will these computers be ready?

One measure is that of "quantum supremacy". Once quantum supremacy is demonstrated, it will usher in the age of quantum computers for real, but what does it mean for quantum computers to have supremacy? In principle, quantum supremacy is something that has to be demonstrated over "classical" computers. That is, the computer you're using right now to read this. It uses binary logic to perform computations. At its core, it's all ones and zeros.

A quantum computer has "quantum supremacy" when it can do a calculation that's impractical for a classical computer to do because it would take too long to be useful. We know from Alan Turing's Universal Turing Machine that you can compute the answer to anything you can express mathematically with a classical computer. It's just that the answer might take several thousand times as long to compute as the age of the universe! This is actually a good time to stop and watch this brief explanation of Universal Turing Machines from the Computerphile channel. In October 2019, a major scientific milestone was announced by Google: it had achieved quantum supremacy. This headline-grabbing term sounded like something from a sci-fi movie—but what does it actually mean?

And why does it matter to our world? Quantum Supremacy refers to the point at which a quantum computer can perform a computation that is practically impossible (or would take an unreasonable amount of time) for even the most powerful classical supercomputers. It doesn’t mean quantum computers are ready to replace classical computers in everyday tasks—it simply marks a breakthrough in quantum computing power. Imagine you’re trying to solve a massive Sudoku puzzle. A classical computer might check every possible solution until it finds the right one. A quantum computer, on the other hand, can check many possibilities at once due to the principle of superposition.

That’s the magic of quantum mechanics—where bits become qubits, and binary 0s and 1s become far more powerful computational tools.

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