A calculation that would take the world’s current-best classical supercomputer 10,000 years to execute was finished in minutes by a quantum computer
published in 2012 John Preskill, a theoretical physicist, posed a question: “Is controlling large-scale quantum systems merely really, really hard, or is it ridiculously hard?” Seven years later the answer is in: it is merely really, really hard.
Quantum computers employ three counterintuitive phenomena. One is “superposition”, the idea behind Schrödinger’s famous dead-and-alive cat. Unlike classical bits, which must be either one or zero, “qubits” may be a mixture of both. Google’s machine has 53 qubits, which between them can represent nearly ten million billion possible superposed states.
A quantum calculation starts by addressing qubits individually: making one of them mostly zero, say, and then entangling it with its neighbour by a certain amount. That done, it lets the rules of physics play out, with the qubits’ states and linkages evolving over time. At the end , the qubits are examined simultaneously to obtain an answer.
That is the explanation which textbooks present, anyway. In the laboratory, things are rather more difficult. Superpositions and entanglements are exceedingly delicate phenomena. Even the jiggling of adjacent molecules can interrupt them and sully a calculation.
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