QUANTUM SUPREMACY

QUANTUM SUPREMACY

TOPIC: Science & Tech.

Context- Google and IBM are at odds over ‘quantum supremacy’. Google claims to have demonstrated something called “quantum supremacy”, in a paper published in Nature. But a team from IBM has published their own paper claiming they can reproduce the Google result on existing supercomputers.

Concept-

Quantum Computers:

• Quantum computing is a type of computation that harnesses the collective properties of quantum states, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement, to perform calculations.
• The devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers.
• Quantum computers represent a new way of processing data. Instead of storing information in “bits” as 0s or 1s like classical computers do, quantum computers use the principles of quantum physics to store information in “qubits” that can also be in states of 0 and 1 at the same time.
• In theory, this allows quantum machines to perform certain calculations much faster than classical computers.
• Traditional computers work on the basis of the laws of classical physics, specifically by utilizing the flow of electricity. A quantum computer, on the other hand, seeks to exploit the laws that govern the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles.

Quantum Supremacy:

• In 2012, Professor John Preskill coined the term “quantum supremacy”
• It describes the point when quantum computers become powerful enough to perform some computational task that classical computers could not do in a reasonable timeframe.
• Quantum supremacy is an intermediate milestone, something to aim for long before it is possible to build large, general-purpose quantum computers.