There is an epic battle happening right now, a battle between two technologies.
First is classical computing technology that has been around for the past 70 years and is currently the most powerful and useful of the two.
While classical computing has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, further advancement is getting more difficult as it pushes the limits of physics.
The second is quantum computing technology that has been around for about 20 years.
Quantum computing’s potential is so great, and the technology is so new, we only scratched the surface on what can be done with the technology.
It’s only a matter of time until a quantum computer will be able to beat the best supercomputers at solving a problem.
And this is the incredible moment will be when Quantum Supremacy is achieved.
Lately, there have been many headlines about the race to quantum supremacy and Google claims to be close to achieving it.
But before we explore what is going on with Google, let’s very quickly go over how a classical computer compares to a quantum computer.
With a classical computer, the basic information unit of information is a bit.
Take two bits from a classical computer, those bits can be in four possible states, 00, 01, 10, or 11.
And classical computers need to stack incredible amounts of bits to improve its processing power.
The best supercomputers today have hundreds of trillions of bits.
But with a quantum computer, the basic unit of information is a quantum bit or qubit.
Two qubits can also represent the same four states of 00, 01, 10 or 11 and all four states at the same time.
This is because Quantum computers harness the phenomenon of quantum mechanics called superposition.
The second phenomenon of quantum mechanics that quantum computers harness is entanglement.
And here is where things get incredible…
For every qubit that is added to a quantum computer, the amount of potential states grows exponentially!
The best classical supercomputers today, with hundreds of trillions of bits, can simulate a quantum computer of just 56 qubits which was accomplished by IBM in 2017.
And when you raise the number of qubits to 260, the size of the classical computer you would need to simulate it would need more bits than there are atoms in the known universe, not stars, but atoms!
Since we now have a grasp of the power of qubits, let’s talk about what’s happening with Google.
Google started researching quantum computing in 2006 using hardware from Canada’s D-Wave.
Then, in 2014, Google hired John Martinis, one of the world's foremost experts on quantum computing.
Martini spent years as the physics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and he brought his whole team with him when he was hired.
So, with Martini and his team, Google started developing their own quantum computing technology and they recently unveiled their latest quantum processor, the mighty Bristlecone!
The Bristlecone is the most powerful quantum processor by far, equipped with 72 qubits! Besting IBM’s 50 qubit and Intel’s 49 qubit processors.
Google has been secretive about the chip since it previewed the chip in March but it will mainly be a test bed for their research for improving error rates.
This is because up to this point, one of the major challenges with quantum computers is that qubits are unstable and easily disturbed.
The processors are so sensitive that unintended sounds can cause algorithmic failure, and on top of that, the processors must be kept extremely cold, at close to absolute zero.
At these temperatures, atoms and molecules are more stable lessoning the change of qubits to flip from one state to another.
So, to fix error rates, Google has developed a Quantum Error Correction technique that carefully choreographs series of logic operations on the qubits to detect where errors have occurred.
They applied the technique with the Bristlecone chip’s predecessor, a 9-quantum processor shown here, achieving their best error rate of .6%.
Although the bristlecone processor has 8 times the qubits as its predecessor, Google strives to improve their error rate.
While Google seems to be leading the race to achieve quantum supremacy, the race spans international competition.
In addition to Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and various startups and academic labs, China and the EU are also competing to be first to achieve quantum supremacy.
