Recent Findings Should be Celebrated, but Practical Realities are the Real Test

By Rich Uhlig

Quantum computing receives a lot of attention due to its potential to take on problems beyond the reach of today’s computers, such as new drug discovery, financial modeling and exploring how the universe works.

Universities, governments and technology companies around the world are striving to achieve a commercially-viable quantum computing system. While the collective progress is real – and is getting noticed – the field is still at mile one of what will be a marathon toward quantum computing’s commercialization.

That said, important milestones along this journey should be recognized, celebrated and built upon.

More Promising Results

As researchers at Intel and across the globe are discovering, quantum computing has the potential to tackle problems that conventional computing – even the world’s most powerful supercomputers – can’t quite handle.

Today, it was confirmed that researchers from Google had demonstrated the extraordinary speed of quantum, as compared to traditional supercomputers, with a benchmark test known as “quantum supremacy.” The Google team designed an algorithm that could run an analysis in 200 seconds on a small quantum processor, a 53-qubit superconducting test chip, that would take the most powerful supercomputer approximately 10,000 years to perform.

For this demonstration, we congratulate the team at Google.
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