Scott Aaronson: Quantum Supremacy: The Gloves Are Off htt...

Scott Aaronson: Quantum Supremacy: The Gloves Are Off https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372: 'does IBM���s analysis mean that ���quantum supremacy��� hasn���t been achieved? No, it doesn���t���at least, not under any definition of ���quantum supremacy��� that I���ve ever used. The Sycamore chip took about 3 minutes.... three minutes versus 2.5 days is still a quantum speedup by a factor of 1200. But even more relevant, I think, is to compare the number of ���elementary operations.��� Let���s generously count a FLOP (floating-point operation) as the equivalent of a quantum gate. Then by my estimate, we���re comparing ~5��10^9 quantum gates against ~2��10^20 FLOPs���a quantum speedup by a factor of ~40 billion.... The broader point is that neither party... denies that the top-supercomputers-on-the-planet-level difficulty of classically simulating Google���s 53-qubit programmable chip really is coming from the exponential character of the quantum states in that chip, and nothing else...

#noted #2019-10-28