<story><title>Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off</title><url>https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>leoh</author><text>Two key points:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; OK, so let’s carefully spell out what the IBM paper says. They argue that, by commandeering the full attention of Summit at Oak Ridge National Lab, the most powerful supercomputer that currently exists on Earth—one that fills the area of two basketball courts, and that (crucially) has 250 petabytes of hard disk space—one could just barely store the entire quantum state vector of Google’s 53-qubit Sycamore chip in hard disk.  And once one had done that, one could simulate the chip in ~2.5 days, more-or-less just by updating the entire state vector by brute force, rather than the 10,000 years that Google had estimated on the basis of my and Lijie Chen’s “Schrödinger-Feynman algorithm” (which can get by with less memory).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; But does IBM’s analysis mean that “quantum supremacy” hasn’t been achieved? No, it doesn’t—at least, not under any definition of “quantum supremacy” that I’ve ever used.</text></comment>
<story><title>Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off</title><url>https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ThePhysicist</author><text>Regardless of whether the Martinis team actually demonstrated quantum supremacy, their achievement is undoubtedly worth the praise it received. I built and operated a superconducting two-qubit processor for my PhD thesis in 2010, so I have a good understanding of the challenges invovled in operating and tuning qubits. For me, seeing the 53 qubit chip, its wiring setup and the control electronics is just breathtaking.&lt;p&gt;I think John&amp;#x27;s team neatly demonstrated that they are far ahead of the competition (e.g. Rigetti, IBM) in terms of maturity and qubit control, and if that&amp;#x27;s any indication of future success I would strongly bet on their team for building the first actually working quantum computer.</text></comment>