On Sat, Sep 21, 2019 at 08:22:40AM -0400, John Clark wrote: > There is a rumor that a team of researchers at Google led by John Martinis > have > performed a calculation on a Quantum Computer in three minutes and 20 seconds > that would have taken Summit, the most powerful conventional supercomputer in > the world, 10,000 years to perform. The rumor started when a paper stating > that > was posted by the Google team, apparently accidentally, on a NASA website and > then quickly taken down. It's not clear exactly what the calculation was > about, > they just said it “marks the first computation that can only be performed on a > quantum processor". My guess is it was probably a weird function of some sort > that would not be of much use to a scientist or engineer, but even so if true > it would be a first proof of concept and be earthsharing. I suppose they want > to check and recheck their work before they make a official announcement this > important and that's why they took the article down. > > John K Clark >
It is rather easy to say that one's optimised algorithm using special purpose hardware performs better than some naive implementation running on a conventional computer. It is not so easy to show that it beats the pants off all possible algorithm running on the conventional computer. For example, it is often the case that some simple algorithm can be parallelised, and run many times faster on a parallel computer, however that there is also a more complicated algorithm that is inherently serial, but actually runs faster than the paralellised one. I have a feeling that may have happened here. But I look forward to a proper demonstration of quantum supremacy. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/20190921213209.GA3498%40zen.
