Quantum Computing Hasn't Achieved 'Supremacy'

In a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, the late Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman spoke about “simulating physics with computers” and added he wanted to talk “about the possibility that there is to be an exact simulation, that the computer will do exactly the same as nature.”

Photo Insert: IBM's 433-quantum-bit (qubit) Osprey processor with which the Google team claimed in 2016 to demonstrate “quantum supremacy.”

But as nature is quantum-mechanical, he pointed out, what you need for that is a quantum computer, Philip Ball wrote for Chemistry World. The rest is history – but history still in the making.

David Deutsch, the physicist who laid out what quantum computing might look like in 1985, said recently that quantum computing has not become a practical technology.

In October, President Joe Biden visited IBM’s new quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, New York, to see an entire room filled with the company’s quantum computers.

On Nov. 9, IBM announced its 433-quantum-bit (qubit) Osprey processor, with which the Google team claimed in 2016 to demonstrate “quantum supremacy,” meaning it could perform a calculation in a few days that would take the best classical computer many millennia. This claim has since been disputed.

Deutsch’s reluctance to accept that practical quantum computing has arrived presumably stems from the question of whether it can do anything truly useful yet.

Sure, one can construct a problem that is very hard for a classical device but ideally suited to a quantum computer and then demonstrate that only a few dozen qubits may be enough to achieve supremacy.

But how helpful is that in the proverbial real world?

When Feynman described the idea of quantum computing, he had it in mind that such a facility would be used to simulate systems governed by quantum laws, such as molecules and materials. However, error-prone qubits mean quantum systems do not yet surpass classical methods.

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