American Google has created the world's most powerful quantum computer, capable of computing orders of magnitude faster than IBM's Summit, considered the world's most powerful supercomputer, the Financial Times reports.
The British newspaper writes that the calculation, which requires a device from IBM for 10 thousand years, was completed by a computer from Google in 200 seconds, and this information, first published in a scientific report on the NASA website, was subsequently deleted. It is noted that currently a quantum computer from Google is capable of performing only one technical calculation, and the device will be ready for solving practical problems in a few years.
“As far as we know, this experiment represents the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor,” the publication is quoted as saying. It also says that "such a serious acceleration in comparison with the known classical algorithms provides an experimental realization of quantum superiority in a computational problem."
The newspaper writes that the developers of Google called their computer "an important milestone on the path to a full-scale quantum computing process," and predicted that the increase in the power of quantum computers will exceed at times the rates of progression that figure in the law of Gordon Moore.
The Financial Times points out that Google declined to comment.
In November 2017, the head of the direction of quantum computers at IBM Dario Gil announced that the developers had created a working prototype of a computer with a capacity of 50 qubits (quantum bits).
In a classical computer, information is represented using bits that take only the values 0 or 1. In a quantum computer, the concept of a (classical) bit is generalized to a quantum bit (qubit) that takes an infinite number of values, each of which is a quantum superposition of the basic states 0 and 1 (a pair values of the quantum characteristic of a particle, for example, an atom, an electron or a photon, in particular, the orientation of the spin). Physical carriers in such a device are, for example, special superconducting solid-state materials, the particles in which can be brought into a special excited (quantum) state, identified as a qubit state. Such material (and quantum states) can be controlled, for example, with a laser.