Google's Quantum Computing Advances

Google has a computer in the works which could truly change the world of Artificial Intelligence, and the date of release is only months away. The team, consisting of Charles Neill at the University of California Santa Barbara and Pedram Roushan at Google, believe that they know how to display "quantum supremacy" for the first time - a quantum computer that is significantly better than a normal computer.

Quantum Computing is based on one core part, a ‘qubit’. In normal computers, data is stored in a bit, which can be either a 1 or a 0, however in a quantum computer ‘qubits’ are used. This type of bit can store data in a third state, both a 0 and 1 at the same time. Using this principle, 50 qubits could represent 10,000,000,000,000,000 numbers, for scale, this would take a petabyte of data for a normal computer to store this.

Right now, quantum computers do technically exist, and they have for a while now, the problem is, they’re just not stable enough. Earlier this year, MIT announced that it had used ultra-cold sodium-potassium molecules to create stable ‘qubits’, Microsoft have also been experimenting with exotic “non-abelian anyons”, a quasiparticle which could unlock quantum computing’s true potential. There’s no reason to invent a computer which is no better than an existing one, and for this reason the race to quantum supremacy has begun.

The Google Team has been experimenting with nine superconducting qubits, with nine metal loops that have electrical current flowing in both directions. They were able to show that these qubits could represent 512 numbers all at once. It’s a small leap in comparison to its potential, but the team believes that they can scale from there.
“These results provide promising evidence that quantum supremacy may be achievable using existing technology,” the researchers told MIT Technology Review.

If the team can pull it off, it could be the first step of many towards a brighter future for computing. Yuri Van Geest, founder of SingularityU in the Netherlands and an seasoned expert in the singularity, said at Cologne’s Pirate Summit in 2016 that analytical jobs would be child’s play for a quantum computer, churning through tasks faster than the blink of an eye. Geest has predicted that by 2018, a quantum computer will be built that has the same computational power as every computer on the earth today, combined. This statement may be optimistic, but time will tell if Geest is correct.

“We are entering a new era on this planet,” Geest said. “We haven’t seen anything like this before.”