Q&A: Google claims ‘quantum supremacy.’ What could that mean for the future of computing?

For the first time ever, a quantum computer has performed a computational task that would be essentially impossible for a conventional computer to complete, according to a team from Google. Google’s scientists are hailing the achievement as the first demonstration of what’s known as “quantum supremacy.” The phrase was coined in 2012 by John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at Caltech, to describe the point at which quantum computers can do things that classical computers simply can’t. “It won’t change anything overnight, but it is significant that quantum computers are now at the stage that at least in some arena, they can outperform the best computers on Earth,” he said. I don’t think anybody has done anything with a quantum computer so far that you couldn’t do much better with existing digital, classical computers. I would say it is an incremental step, but we might as well sit back and enjoy it as an indication that the technology of quantum computing is marching forward and we are getting to the point where potentially we can do things with quantum computers that we couldn’t do with classical ones.