Google published a paper late Friday night announcing it had built a quantum computer capable of solving calculations faster than the most powerful computer on the market today. The company later removed the page from its official blog, but someone had time to see it and the news began to circulate, along with some photos of the document itself, without being denied. Those who have had the opportunity to read the document reported that the processor developed by the Mountain View researchers would have solved in 3 minutes a calculation that the IBM Summit, currently the most powerful machine in the world, could have solved in no less than 10.000 years. The company would have thus obtained for the first time what is called “quantum supremacy”, that is, the ability of a quantum processor to solve problems that would otherwise be unsolvable without calculations that require enormous processing times: “This experiment represents the first computational calculation that can only be solved by a quantum processor”, the document read. That society was close to quantum supremacy was something many were already quite certain of. Now the official confirmation is still missing, as is the validation of the scientific community. “The news should be welcomed with cautious optimism. What it does suggest, however, is that the conditions for quantum supremacy exist,” Raffaele Mauro, managing director of Endeavor Italia, commented to Agi. “From what emerges from the Google paper, it seems that the quantum computer was able to solve a problem of enormous complexity in two hundred seconds. However, this does not mean that it can solve all types of problems. And of course, we don’t even think we’ll have personal quantum computers any time soon.” A quantum computer uses the laws of quantum mechanics to do calculations and solve problems. If classical computers have as their fundamental unit the bit and binary logic (made of sequences of 0 and 1), quantum computers have the qubit, which thanks to the superposition of quantum layers can 'be' 0 and 1 at the same time, in different layers. The number of states that a qubit can represent is vastly greater than the two states 0 and 1. By putting more qubits together, the number of possible states that can be processed over time increases enormously. An example: imagine searching for the word 'quantum' in a document. Even if we don't realize it, the classical computer proceeds line by line to search for that word. And it finds it x number of times in a unit of time. The quantum computer is as if it had all the pages of the document in front of it at the same time, on different 'layers', greatly reducing the time required to resolve the required operation. This ability, which may not be essential when searching for a word in a text, may be essential if the problem to be solved is much larger. Like the calculation solved by Google's computer. But what can happen now? “The problem they solved could have immediate implications for optimization processes and cryptography. Optimization problems are widespread in industry and finance, from logistics to data analytics. I imagine long-term implications for machine learning. But in the short term, complex chemistry problems could be solved, or new materials simulated, and doing this with quantum computers would be interesting because they simulate quantum systems themselves. New drugs could emerge from this research, for example,” Mauro hypothesizes. Yet it is difficult to imagine that tomorrow we will have a quantum computer at home: “The most likely thing is that these services will be accessible in the cloud for now. Amazon, Google and Microsoft could supply them from there in the near future.” In what way? “Maybe a company needs to find a material to build something. It would be a case of a complex problem to solve: finding the perfect material for a particular task. The company might not have its own quantum computer but might plug into the cloud, input the data, and have cloud computing process it. But for direct consumers at the moment I don't see many possibilities of having one", continues Mauro. “Also because these are very expensive technologies, which work at temperatures close to absolute zero.” In short, we have to wait.
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