IBM and University of Chicago researchers have completed a quantum computation that leading classical methods could not practically reproduce. The system used 70 error-corrected logical qubits and finished the task in roughly 15 minutes while also providing statistical evidence that the result was reliable.
...
"We are now firmly in the quantum advantage era," said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. "We have demonstrated a quantum computation beyond the practical reach of classical computers that establishes, with statistical confidence, a lower bound on how faithfully it was executed. This milestone gives scientists, developers, and businesses a new foundation for trusting quantum computers as they scale to problems far beyond what we can achieve classically."
In every experiment, the quantum computer scored so well that its results were statistically inconsistent with what any classical strategy could have achieved.
Better yet, as the problem grew more difficult, the gap widened. The experimentally observed advantage increased exponentially with bit-string length, closely tracking, if not quite matching, the behavior expected of the optimal quantum strategy.
At the largest scale tested – 37-bit strings – the system didn't quite achieve the theoretical ideal performance, but the results still demonstrated an "exponentially large violation of classicality,"
Facebook
Google
GitHub
Linkedin
