(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc.’s Google said it’s built a computer that’s reached “quantum supremacy,” performing a computation in 200 seconds that would take the fastest supercomputers about 10,000 years. The results of Google’s tests, which were conducted using a quantum chip it developed in-house, were published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature. Rather than storing information in binary 0s or 1s like classical computers, quantum computers rely on “qubits”, which can be both 0 and 1 simultaneously, dramatically increasing the amount of information that can be encoded. If quantum supremacy means doing something classical computers can’t, this isn’t it, they wrote. While the world’s biggest tech companies are racing to develop a quantum computer that passes the scrutiny of academics, some products are commercially available already.

Source: National Post October 23, 2019 12:11 UTC