Computer Company Breaks

‘Quantum Supremacy’ Record

Set by Google
The latest Quantinuum computer has nearly double the number of qubits
as its predecessor and outperforms its competitors 100-fold.

By Isaac Schultz
Updated July 12, 2024 | Comments (9)

The quantum computing company Quantinuum recently announced a

quantum computer it says outperformed a landmark Google computer’s result
100-fold.

The 2019 Google result used a specific test called the linear cross entropy
benchmark in the attempt to demonstrate quantum supremacy, the point at
which quantum computers outperform state-of-the-art ordinary (or classical)
computers.

What exactly is a quantum computer?

Quantum computers operate on quantum bits. Quantum bits (qubits for

short) are like ordinary computer bits, except their values can be both 0 and 1
simultaneously. Thanks to this quantum quirk, the computers can consider
more solutions to a problem faster than a classical computer. Eventually,
quantum computers should be able to solve problems that classical computers
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 cannot.

But quantum computers don’t look like ordinary computers. That’s because
their qubits are often supercooled atoms, set up in an array. Cooled to such a
degree, the atoms enter a quantum state. The moment any one of the qubits’
value is certain, the quantum state decoheres and the quantum operation falls
apart. For that reason, quantum computers as they currently exist are only in
dedicated research and laboratory settings.

What did the Quantinuum quantum computer do?

The Quantinuum computer outperformed a significant 2019 achievement by

Google’s Sycamore processor, which took about 200 seconds to perform a task
that would take a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer about 10,000 years.

To achieve the result, the Quantinuum team upgraded its H2-1 processor from
a 32-qubit system to a 56-qubit system, vastly increasing its computing power.
According to a Quantinuum release, its quantum computer also ran its
algorithm with about 30,000 times less power than it would’ve taken a
classical computer to run the operation.

Importantly, the Quantinuum computer achieved a new record for the cross
entropy benchmark, a metric used to compare the performance of different
quantum computers. The benchmark measures the power of the quantum
system; the noisier the system, the worse (closer to zero than 1) your results
are. Google’s 2019 score on the cross entropy benchmark was ~.002; H2-1’s
score was ~.35. “In contrast to past announcements associated with XEB
experiments, 35% is a significant step towards the idealized 100% fidelity limit
in which the computational advantage of quantum computers is clearly in
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 sight,” stated a Quantinuum release. The team’s research is currently hosted
on preprint server arXiv.

The Quantinuum H2-1 Ion-trap with 56 qubits. Image © Quantinuum

What else do quantum computers do?

Quantum computers are testbeds for the future of information—that is, the
way that people store and move data, as well as compute new information.
Last year, a different team of researchers showed how quantum computers
could run computations in a way that looks a lot like time travel.

“The experiment that we describe seems impossible to solve with standard

(not quantum) physics, which obeys the normal arrow of time,” David
Arvidsson-Shukur, a quantum physicist at the University of Cambridge and
the study’s lead author, told Gizmodo at the time. “Thus, it appears as if
quantum entanglement can generate instances which effectively look like time
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 travel.”

The previous year, another team claimed they managed to create a quantum
wormhole—a portal through which quantum information could
instantaneously travel.

Quantinuum has also run the news circuit (no pun intended). In 2022, a team
using a Quantinuum computer managed to create a new phase of matter by
blasting the qubits with lasers reading out the Fibonacci sequence.

Quantum computing sometimes reads like science fiction, because it seems so

odd take advantage of the realm beyond classical physics to make complex
calculations. But the systems keep getting better, and their applications are
diverse (though some verge on pipe dreams). For now it’s relegated to
research settings, but quantum computers are slowly creating the world of
tomorrow today.
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