Google claims to have demonstrated something called quantum supremacy, in a paperpublished in Nature.
But a team from IBM has published its ownpaperclaiming it can reproduce the Google result on existing supercomputers.
On the other hand, just approaching this point has exciting implications for the future of technology.
Quantum computers represent a new way of processing data.
In theory, this allows quantum machines to perform certain calculations much faster than classical computers.
He deliberately didnt require the computational task to be a useful one.
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The IBM paper does not challenge this exponential growth.
What the IBM team did was find a way of trading increased memory usage for faster computation time.
They estimate simulating the Google experiment would require memory equivalent to about 10m regular hard drives.
IBMs new algorithm might just bring the calculation within reach of the worlds biggest supercomputer.
But add a couple more qubits, and the calculation will be beyond reach again.
In reality, it just means they can outperform classical computers at something.
And that something might be an artificial demonstration with no practical applications.
In retrospect, the choice of terminology was perhaps unfortunate (though Preskill recently wrote areasoned defenseof it).
Impressive science
Yet Googles work is a significant milestone.
Its a very interesting and challenging scientific question, and an extremely active area of research.
As such, Googles results are animpressive piece of experimental science.
Nor are these useless results that achieve nothing new (and the IBM paper doesnt claim this).
The truth is somewhere in between.
IBMs paper is an example of that.
This is also useful science.
This is how science and technology progresses.
Only a few of these advances and debates hit the headlines.
The reality is both less dramatic and more interesting.
