Quantum Supremacy

25 Sep 2019 by svet

Past couple of days there has been a lot of noise in the medias initiated by a sudden release on the NASA website of "Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor" paper (already removed). The copy of this doc is still circulating around the web making many people in our industry to freak out.

I'm not pretending I have been able get to the bottom of this issue but it seems that this saga had officially started more than a year ago (March 7, 2018 to be exact) when Google's director of engineering signed 15-pages "Space Act Agreement" with NASA AMES Research Center.

In a nut shell, Google provided NASA team (Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory or QuAIL) with an access to their quantum processor and software. In exchange Google gets all the results of team's researches and the right to use its for their own purposes.

Now, only what QuAIL employees claims in this leaked report is that they were capable to successfully demonstrate that a processor with programmable superconducting processor ("quantum computer") is able to create quantum states on 53 qubits.

Basically, it means that they've used the so-called "random circuit sampling" (exploring the Hilbert space - a space with any finite or infinite number of dimensions) to prove that quantum computer is more efficient than the most powerful of existing supercomputers for that specific set of computational tasks (or, in fancy terms, "achieving quantum supremacy").

Citing: "While our processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of the quantum circuit 1 million times, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task."

Does that create a "clear and present danger" to ECC? Of course, it does not. Citing the authors of this paper themselves: "However, realizing the full promise of quantum computing (e.g. Shor's algorithm for factoring) still requires technical leaps to engineer fault-tolerant logical qubits".

Might secure algorithms we all use be breached in a future? According to authors - possibly, providing more resources and time are devoted to this objective. Citing: "We expect computational power will continue to grow at a double exponential rate [Moore's law]. ... to eventually [reach] the computational volume needed to run ... the Shor or Grover algorithms the engineering of quantum error correction will have to become a focus of attention."

Should we be worried? IMHO, we have many much more important priorities than that.