Report on the quantum superiority of the Google processor leaked to the Web

The Google’s Sycamore superconducting quantum processor may have achieved quantum superiority – a level of performance at which it can solve problems that previously required an incomparably longer time.

A report titled “Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor” appeared on NASA’s website, but was later deleted and is now only available in the Bing cache. Representatives of the search engine have not yet confirmed the reliability of the document, and IBM experts have questioned the ability of a competing system to solve universal problems.

As follows from the report, Google’s 53-qubit processor managed to generate a certain sequence of random numbers in 3 minutes and 20 seconds.

“To accomplish the same task, the planet’s most powerful supercomputer, Summit, would take about 10,000 years, and the Google Cloud cluster would take about 5.7 billion years”, – the report says.

It should be noted that Google paid much attention to the fault tolerance of the processor, however, Sycamore, like other analogues, is able to perform only one task – in their report, researchers acknowledge this problem.

The head of IBM Research Dario Gil draws the same attention. The specialist doubted the correct use of the term “quantum superiority” in relation to the development of competitors and said that the Q System One quantum computer created by his team would soon be available to Q Network customers.

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Experts suggest that the report was published in the public domain and removed from the site until the end of the analysis of the results of the experiment. Google and NASA have entered into an agreement whereby the agency checks the calculations made with Sycamore on their supercomputers.

A significant increase in performance in quantum systems is achieved through operations with qubits – information storage elements that, unlike classical bits, are able to take values 0 and 1 at the same time. The Sycamore quantum system uses superconductivity and operates at a temperature of minus 273 degrees Celsius.

“However, even the performance of quantum computers is currently insufficient to crack modern RSA-based encryption algorithms using a brute force attack”, – notice the information security specialists.