Google claims breakthrough in quantum computing

SAN FRANCISCO — Google announced Wednesday it has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing, saying it has developed an experimental processor that took just minutes to complete a calculation that would take the world’s best supercomputer thousands of years.

The feat could open the door someday to machines so blazingly fast that they could revolutionize such tasks as finding new medicines, developing vastly smarter artificial intelligence systems and, most ominously, cracking the encryption that protects some of the world’s most closely guarded secrets.

Such practical uses are still probably decades away, scientists said.

Big tech companies including Microsoft, IBM and Intel are avidly pursuing quantum computing, a new and somewhat bewildering technology for vastly sped-up information processing.

While conventional computing relies on bits, or pieces of data that bear either a one or zero, quantum computing employs quantum bits, or qubits, that contain values of one and zero simultaneously.

But quantum computing requires placing the fragile and volatile qubits in colder-than-outer-space-refrigerators to control them.

“The more interesting milestone will be a useful application,” said Chris Monroe, a University of Maryland physicist who is also the founder of quantum startup Ionq.

Google’s findings, however, faced pushback from other industry researchers. A version of Google’s paper leaked online last month.

IBM took issue with Google’s claim that it had achieved “quantum supremacy,” or the point when a quantum computer can perform a calculation that a traditional computer can’t complete within its lifetime. Google disputed IBM’S claims. Whether or not Google achieved “quantum supremacy,” the research suggests the field is maturing.