
“Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor”: supplement - Gerthak
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vReCUoN9oOGGybt2TbzJBdPyALafyUND/view
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stallmanite
Thanks for posting this document. I love the detailed description of the
experimental setup. Waiting on bated breath for Scott Aaronson to post about
this on his blog so I can know how excited to be.

(Not enough of a Quantum Information Theorist to reliably seperate hype from
substance in such a complex field.)

~~~
core-questions
The gist of it is that they've been able to simulate a very small number of
random quantum gates faster than a classical-compute simulation of the same
thing. It's not useful for anything, and it's at the level of things that
D-Wave was doing for processor calibration over a decade ago.

Claiming this as "supremacy" is premature.

~~~
svat
"Quantum supremacy" is a technical term that simply means demonstrating that a
quantum computer can in fact perform _some_ computation (something artificial
like sampling from a certain kind of distribution) faster than a classical
computer, not that the computation is useful for anything rightaway. This has
not been achieved so far, but is expected to be around the corner. See this
article from July: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-supremacy-is-
coming-h...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-supremacy-is-coming-heres-
what-you-should-know-20190718/) and some of the better-informed comments on
these other threads:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21047804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21047804)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21043659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21043659)

