Google has laid claim to being the first company to achieve “quantum supremacy” with its Sycamore quantum processor.

The search giant yesterday announced in the Nature journal that the programmable superconducting processor had breached a major milestone in computing by successfully performing a task in 200 seconds that would require 10,000 years from the best supercomputers in the world.

The achievement has been hailed as a major breakthrough for research into quantum computing methods, and departs from classical binary computing models which operate on units of information called ‘bits’ with a value of either 0 or 1.

Quantum computing allows for both binary (0 or 1) and qubits - a quantum bit - which can be both 1 or 0 at the same time, allowing multiple calculations to be carried out at speeds thousands of times faster than traditional supercomputers.

Google’s Sycamore device has 54 qubits, but ran on 53 for the experiment, as one did not work. The paper submitted to Nature by John Martinis and his colleagues described how the processor was set a random sampling task of numbers, with Sycamore completing the task in three minutes 20 seconds. Conventional computing would have taken 10,000 years to complete the task, the researchers said.

While the scientific community believes functional uses for quantum computing may be decades away, Google said in a blog post that quantum computing could potentially hold the key to “solving problems that would be too difficult or even impossible for classical computers—like designing better batteries, figuring out what molecules might make effective medicines or minimizing emissions from the creation of fertilizer”.

It added: “They could also help improve existing advanced technologies like machine learning.”

However, after Google revealed its findings, software giant IBM - which is also developing its own quantum computers - questioned whether the test amounted to “quantum supremacy” and said the task could be performed on traditional processors with far greater fidelity.

Google’s blog post explained: “This achievement is the result of years of research and the dedication of many people. It’s also the beginning of a new journey: figuring out how to put this technology to work. We’re working with the research community and have open sourced tools to enable others to work alongside us to identify new applications.”

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