Neven’s Law & The Doubly Exponential Rate of Quantum Computing Power
A new “law” Suggests Quantum Supremacy Could Happen This Year
Excerpts and salient points ~
+ In December 2018, scientists at Google AI ran a calculation on Google’s best quantum processor. They were able to reproduce the computation using a regular laptop. Then in January, they ran the same test on an improved version of the quantum chip. This time they had to use a powerful desktop computer to simulate the result. By February, there were no longer any classical computers in the building that could simulate their quantum counterparts. The researchers had to request time on Google’s enormous server network to do that.
Neven’s Law: “… a new kind of rule to describe how quickly quantum computers are gaining on classical ones…”
+ That rapid improvement has led to what’s being called “Neven’s law,” a new kind of rule to describe how quickly quantum computers are gaining on classical ones. The rule began as an in-house observation before Neven mentioned it in May at the Google Quantum Spring Symposium. There, he said that quantum computers are gaining computational power relative to classical ones at a “doubly exponential” rate—a staggeringly fast clip.
+ Neven says that Google’s best quantum chips have recently been improving at an exponential rate. (This rapid improvement has been driven by a reduction in the error rate in the quantum circuits. Reducing the error rate has allowed the engineers to build larger quantum processors, Neven said.) If classical computers require exponentially more computational power to simulate quantum processors, and those quantum processors are growing exponentially more powerful with time, you end up with this doubly exponential relationship between quantum and classical machines.
Source: Scientific American. Kevin Hartnett, A new “law” Suggests Quantum Supremacy Could Happen This Year…
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