What Quantum Supremacy Should Look Like if Google’s Neven if Correct

The current state of noisy qubit quantum computers is a bit difficult to assess.

Superconducting quantum chips and ion trapped quantum computers are in the 16 qubit to 100 qubit range. Rigetti Computing is seeking an application that will give it a practical advantage over conventional computers. Other companies are pushing other metrics to gauge progress.

Google has said they are at 72 qubits but there are reports that that announcement in March 2018 was premature. There is only 20 qubit quantum computers that can be accessed via cloud computer interfaces.

Google has stated that they went from laptops, to desktops and then to a large cloud network to match the power of their quantum chips.

Neven has said that Google’s quantum systems could become faster than any classical computers by the end of 2019. This suggests that quantum supremacy should occur with noisy superconducting qubits with 70-200 qubits.

Noisy qubits should not need error correction up to 500 to 10000 qubits. The higher qubit ranges can be reached with lower error rates going from one in a hundred to one in ten thousand.

Moore’s Law is a doubling function, we can represent Moore’s Law like this, where n represents a two year interval:

n Classical computing power (2n)
* 1 2
* 2 4
* 3 8
* 4 16
* 5 32
* 6 64
* 7 128
* 8 256
* 9 512
* 10 1024

Google’s Neven’s Law says there is a double exponential improvement in quantum systems. n equals each new improvement to Google’s quantum processor. Google is exponentially increasing the power of its processors on a monthly to semi-monthly basis. However, there has been no announcement or confirmation that the 72 qubit chip or follow on chip works since march 2018.

        n      2n       2(2n)         Quantum Computing Power Relative to Classical Computing Power

     * 1       2         22            4
     * 2       4         24            16
     * 3       8         28            256
     * 4      16       216           65,536
     * 5      32       232           4,294,967,296
     * 6      64       264           18,446,744,073,709,551,616
     * 7      128      2128          3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+38
     * 8      256      2256          1.1579208923731619542357098500869e+77
     * 9      512      2512          1.3407807929942597099574024998206e+154
     * 10     1024     21024         1.797693134862315907729305190789e+308

5 steps of improvement is a billion times more powerful
6 steps is a billion times a billion times
Between steps 7 and 8 is a universe of atoms of classical computing.

IBM has talked about quantum volume which also considers how many steps of quantum computation a system can perform.

Making tweeks to the current quantum systems can make giant improvements to their utility.

Google does not have its full 72 qubit system working.

Any of the competing quantum systems that fully uses 100-200 qubits will have quantum supremacy for some applications.

Getting to a fully useful 200-400 qubits should have overall quantum supremacy.

Getting to fully useful 400-800 qubits should make quantum systems vastly better than current systems for any application where they can be used.

3 thoughts on “What Quantum Supremacy Should Look Like if Google’s Neven if Correct”

  1. Why is every article on this incapable of printing exponents? Use a caret at least: at n=4, 2^n=16 and 2^(2^n)=2^16=65536.

    Anyway…I kinda feel like it might be too early to say this is a law we can count on. It’s not uncommon for new technologies have massive improvements while you’re doing early experiments, but usually that doesn’t continue.

  2. IBM’s quantum volume metric is the most useful one so far; I like it. It is basically a calculation of everything that “quantum advantage” or “quantum supremacy” is minus the cost comparison. There is no true quantum advantage unless there is a cost advantage, but that can get complex as potentially you could create a quantum computer that costs 10x as much per computation to use, but still finishes it 100x faster. That improved turn around time might be worth it for some. Unarguable quantum advantage would be when both cost and turn around time are clearly better for problems that quantum computers can speed up.

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