Quantum Supremacy Wikipedia

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Jan 2, 2026, 12:23 PM

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... Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we’re suddenly living in the quantum era. Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

Spend an afternoon reading about quantum computing, and it won’t take long until you stumble across the term “quantum supremacy.” While this is quite a lofty-sounding boast, the idea is relatively simple: If a... Google first tried to claim the supremacy crown back in 2019, and researchers in China argued the same a year later. But in both cases, experts weren’t so sure if true supremacy had been achieved. In Google’s case, its Sycamore quantum computer completed a task in three minutes and 20 seconds that the company said would take a classical computer 10,000 years to complete. An official website of the United States government Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. https://www.nist.gov/physics/introduction-new-quantum-revolution/quantum-supremacy Researchers are no longer focused solely on building a quantum computer that could carry out Shor’s algorithm and break encryption codes. For many, an intermediate goal is to achieve “quantum supremacy,” a term coined by Caltech’s John Preskill to describe the demonstration of a quantum computer that can carry out tasks that are not possible... 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... Posted by Sergio Boixo, Research Scientist and Theory Team Lead, and Charles Neill, Quantum Electronics Engineer, Quantum A.I. Lab 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. A quantum computer is a (real or theoretical) computer that exploits superposed and entangled states. Quantum computers can be viewed as sampling from quantum systems that evolve in ways that may be described as operating on an enormous number of possibilities simultaneously, though still subject to strict computational constraints. By contrast, ordinary ("classical") computers operate according to deterministic rules. (A classical computer can, in principle, be replicated by a classical mechanical device, with only a simple multiple of time cost. On the other hand (it is believed), a quantum computer would require exponentially more time and energy to be simulated classically.) It is widely believed that a quantum computer could perform some calculations exponentially...

For example, a large-scale quantum computer could break some widely used public-key cryptographic schemes and aid physicists in performing physical simulations. However, current hardware implementations of quantum computation are largely experimental and only suitable for specialized tasks. The basic unit of information in quantum computing, the qubit (or "quantum bit"), serves the same function as the bit in ordinary or "classical" computing.[1] However, unlike a classical bit, which can be in... The result of measuring a qubit is one of the two states given by a probabilistic rule. If a quantum computer manipulates the qubit in a particular way, wave interference effects amplify the probability of the desired measurement result. The design of quantum algorithms involves creating procedures that allow a quantum computer to perform this amplification.

Quantum computers are not yet practical for real-world applications. Physically engineering high-quality qubits has proven to be challenging. If a physical qubit is not sufficiently isolated from its environment, it suffers from quantum decoherence, introducing noise into calculations. National governments have invested heavily in experimental research aimed at developing scalable qubits with longer coherence times and lower error rates. Example implementations include superconductors (which isolate an electrical current by eliminating electrical resistance) and ion traps (which confine a single atomic particle using electromagnetic fields). Researchers have claimed, and are widely believed to be correct, that certain quantum devices can outperform classical computers on narrowly defined tasks, a milestone referred to as quantum advantage or quantum supremacy.

These tasks are not necessarily useful for real-world applications. For many years, the fields of quantum mechanics and computer science formed distinct academic communities.[2] Modern quantum theory was developed in the 1920s to explain perplexing physical phenomena observed at atomic scales,[3][4] and digital... As physicists applied quantum mechanical models to computational problems and swapped digital bits for qubits, the fields of quantum mechanics and computer science began to converge. In 1980, Paul Benioff introduced the quantum Turing machine, which uses quantum theory to describe a simplified computer.[8] When digital computers became faster, physicists faced an exponential increase in overhead when simulating quantum dynamics,[9]...

Quantum Supremacy Wikipedia

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