A new experiment by IBM computers shows that quantum computers could soon outperform classical digital computers at practical tasks in the next two years.
Quantum computers could beat classical ones at answering practical questions within two years, a new experiment from IBM computers shows. The demonstration hints that true quantum supremacy, in which quantum computers overtake classical digital ones, could be here surprisingly soon.
In the new study, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists used IBM's quantum computer, known as Eagle, to simulate the magnetic properties of a real material faster than a classical computer could. It achieved this feat because it used a special error-mitigating process that compensated for noise, a fundamental weakness of quantum computers.
By contrast, quantum computers employ quantum bits, or qubits, that can take on many states at once. Qubits rely on quantum phenomena such as superposition, in which a particle can exist in multiple states simultaneously, and on quantum entanglement, in which the states of distant particles can be linked so that changing one instantaneously changes the other. In theory, this allows qubits to make calculations much faster, and in parallel, that digital bits would do slowly and in sequence.
Claims of quantum supremacy have surfaced before: In 2019, Google scientists claimed that the company's quantum computer, known as Sycamore, had solved a problem in 200 seconds that an ordinary computer would take 10,000 years to crack. But the problem it solved — essentially spitting out a huge list of random numbers and then checking their accuracy, had no practical use.
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