Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

TECH NEWS | Google announces breakthrough in quantum computing

0

Google said that its research team has achieved a big breakthrough in quantum computing, claiming it attained “quantum supremacy”.

Concept of a fututistic quantum computer made of small cells

3d rendered image

Google said on Wednesday that its research team has achieved a big breakthrough in quantum computing, claiming it attained “quantum supremacy,” a milestone on the path to full-scale quantum computing.

Google announced the results in the journal Nature, saying the achievement came after more than a decade of work at Google, including the use of its internally developed 53-qubit quantum computer — Sycamore.

“Our Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times — our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years,” Nature quoted the Google researchers as saying in its report.

“Very proud that our @GoogleAI team has achieved a big breakthrough in quantum computing known as quantum supremacy after over a decade of work… Thank you to our collaborators in the research community who helped make this possible,” Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai tweeted Wednesday morning.

In an interview with the MIT Technology Review, Pichai said it’s an important milestone for a revolutionary way of processing data, comparing to the 12-second first flight by the Wright brothers, even though its quantum computer running in an extremely controlled environment, is still finicky, exotic and not likely to replace classical computer right now.

But the result offered evidence that quantum computers could break out of research labs and head toward mainstream computing, Pichai argued.

“You would need to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer with more qubits so that you can generalize it better, execute it for longer periods of time, and hence be able to run more complex algorithms.” he said, “But you know, if in any field you have a breakthrough, you start somewhere. To borrow an analogy — the Wright brothers. The first plane flew only for 12 seconds, and so there is no practical application of that. But it showed the possibility that a plane could fly.”

Quantum computers are entirely different from traditional ones.

The classical computers store and process data as individual bits, each a 1 or a 0, quantum computers use a different foundation, called a qubit, each of that can store a combination of different states of 1 and 0 at the same time through a phenomenon called superposition.

Moreover, multiple qubits can be ganged together through another quantum phenomenon called entanglement, so that a quantum computer has capability to explore a vast number of possible solutions to a problem at the same time.

In principle, a quantum computer’s performance can grow exponentially if the producer add more qubits, but instabilities will cause qubits to lose their data, so researchers are struggling to work on error correction techniques in order to let a calculation sidestep those problems.

A number of companies including Google, Intel, Microsoft, Honeywell, Rigetti Computing and IBM are researching general-purpose quantum computers.

xinhua
by Xinhua News Agency
Xinhua News Agency at Xinhua News Agency | Website

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *