Supercomputers have been in existence for decades, as personal computers are developing with more and better features, supercomputers are also developing as well in 2019, Google’s Sycamore quantum computer achieved a quantum supremacy record by completing several tasks within 200 seconds that would have taken a classical supercomputer 10,000 years to finish.
There are several controversies around this supercomputer’s achievement, but Google’s claim has withstood the test of time – until a few weeks ago when a new technology company, named Quantinuum said it reached an error correction performance threshold that many believed was years away.
One newly developed 56-qubit H2-1 computer has dislodged Google’s Sycamore quantum computer from its ‘quantum supremacy’ record by 100-fold.
At the moment, the title l belongs to Quantinuum, a new technology company that ran multiple experiments on its quantum computer between January and June 2024.
According to the claims that its machine was able to hit an error correction performance threshold that a lot of experts believed was still years away.
Quantinuum published its results last month in a study that was made available to the preprint database arXiv. The study has not been peer-reviewed yet.
FOR YOU: The Singularity is Near: Transhumanist Predictions for AI, Immortality by 2045
Quantinuum technology company claimed to have demonstrated a significant performance improvement with the Random Circuit Sampling algorithm. It achieved a linear cross entropy benchmark (XEB) score of ~0.35, which is about 100 times better than the former demonstrations.
According to Quantinuum, the H2-1 configured together with 32 physical qubits supported the creation of four highly logical qubits operating at “better than break-even” – representing a step towards fault-tolerant quantum computing.
The logical qubits are more better and reliable than the physical qubits they’re composed of, a crucial threshold for practical quantum error correction.
Likewise, the logical circuit error rates are up to 800x lower than the corresponding physical circuit error rates. Quantinuum said, no other quantum computing company has come even close to matching.
Error correction will be able to allow quantum computers to perform harder, longer, and more complex calculations by protecting quantum information from noise and decoherence.
When it comes to quantum computing, error rates are much higher than in classical computing; current state-of-the-art quantum computers exhibit error rates between 1% to 0.1%.
Google’s Sycamore quantum computer comes with 53 qubits and it was introduced in 2019 when it completed a specific task in 200 seconds, with an XEB result of approximately 0.002.
Google said it would have taken the world’s most advanced supercomputer, Summit, over 10,000 years to finish the task.
The Sycamore quantum computer achieved, in short, a significant milestone in quantum computing which is also known as quantum supremacy.
IBM argued that the task would just take 2 and a half days on a classical system like Summit.
The founder and Chief Product Officer of Quantinuum, Ilyas Khan, appears to accept Sycamore’s achievement. According to him; “When, in late 2019, Google released details of their ‘quantum supremacy’ experiment, Sundar Pichai their CEO published a blog that has withstood the test of time concerning the importance of the milestone that was then reached,” Quantinuum’s work “elevates that bar to one where we now operate in a place that has been anticipated for so long. One where classical supercomputers simply cannot compete and where the computational task is measurable and relevant.”
