Quantum Computing has been under the spotlight after a paper by John Martinis’ group from UCSB and Google was published in Nature the past 23rd of October, 2019. The article “Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor” claims that the Google Sycamore quantum computer can outperform the world’s most powerful conventional processor in a particular task, in this case describing the likelihood for different outcomes for a quantum random number generator. It takes about 200 seconds to the Sycamore quantum processor to complete the task while as they claim, “the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years”. IBM has heavily debated this claim stating in a publication that the task could be evaluated in around 2.5 days. The core of the disagreement goes back to the concept of Quantum Supremacy introduced by John Preskill in 2012 and explained by Scott Aaronson as the “use of a quantum computer to solve some well-defined set of problems that could take orders of magnitude longer to solve with any currently known algorithms on existing classical computers”. As William Fefferman from University of Chicago says, regardless the reduction of time scale proposed by IBM, there’s no evidence that any classical computer can perform the same task in anything better than exponential time, while Sycamore performs it in polynomial time; thus “the actual time estimate is not very important”.
Regardless the discrepancy between Google and IBM, Quantum Supremacy has been the topic of diverse discussions, varying from the mere wording of the concept, the exacerbation of the already”overhype” status of quantum technologies, the publication strategy by Martinis’ group, possible applications and future investments or redistribution of the budget as well as other possible consequences in the field of quantum science. For these reasons ICONS organized a debate on the topic.
Moderated by Patrick Huembeli, the debate counted with the participation of Jose Martinez from the ICFO spinoff Quside joining the two ICFO professors Antonio Acín and Maciej Lewenstein as panelists.
The debate started with an introduction by Maciej covering the general aspects of Quantum Computing and Quantum Simulators as well as the specific experiment done by John Martinis’ group. It was pointed out that the fact that the experiment claiming Quantum Supremacy is essentially academic, does not demerit the relevance and technological advance that Google’s Sycamore programmable processor implies.
Along the debate, the current status of quantum computation as well as the expectations for the quantum technologies field were discussed from different perspectives, mainly academic and industrial. In comparison with Artificial Intelligence, it was pointed out the importance of being realistic when speculating about the possibilities in the field for the near future.
At the end of the debate, some time was left for questions from the audience, treating topics about the currently available comercial quantum devices and future perspective for young quantum scientists.
