A paper leaked from Google last week claimed that their researchers had achieved “quantum supremacy”, the milestone at which a quantum computer performs a calculation faster than any existing classical computer. Scott Aaronson has a great explainer about this. The upshot is that Google’s computer is much too small to crack all our encryptions (only 53 qubits, the equivalent of bits for quantum computers), but it still appears to be a genuine quantum computer doing a genuine quantum computation that is genuinely not feasible otherwise.
How impressed should we be about this?
On one hand, the practical benefits of a 53-qubit computer are pretty minimal. Scott discusses some applications: you can generate random numbers, distributed in a way that will let others verify that they are truly random, the kind of thing it’s occasionally handy to do in cryptography. Still, by itself this won’t change the world, and compared to the quantum computing hype I can understand if people find this underwhelming.
On the other hand, as Scott says, this falsifies the Extended Church-Turing Thesis! And that sounds pretty impressive, right?
Ok, I’m actually just re-phrasing what I said before. The Extended Church-Turing Thesis proposes that a classical computer (more specifically, a probabilistic Turing machine) can efficiently simulate any reasonable computation. Falsifying it means finding something that a classical computer cannot compute efficiently but another sort of computer (say, a quantum computer) can. If the calculation Google did truly can’t be done efficiently on a classical computer (this is not proven, though experts seem to expect it to be true) then yes, that’s what Google claims to have done.
So we get back to the real question: should we be impressed by quantum supremacy?
Well, should we have been impressed by the Higgs?
The detection of the Higgs boson in 2012 hasn’t led to any new Higgs-based technology. No-one expected it to. It did teach us something about the world: that the Higgs boson exists, and that it has a particular mass. I think most people accept that that’s important: that it’s worth knowing how the world works on a fundamental level.
Google may have detected the first-known violation of the Extended Church-Turing Thesis. This could eventually lead to some revolutionary technology. For now, though, it hasn’t. Instead, it teaches us something about the world.
It may not seem like it, at first. Unlike the Higgs boson, “Extended Church-Turing is false” isn’t a law of physics. Instead, it’s a fact about our capabilities. It’s a statement about the kinds of computers we can and cannot build, about the kinds of algorithms we can and cannot implement, the calculations we can and cannot do.
Facts about our capabilities are still facts about the world. They’re still worth knowing, for the same reasons that facts about the world are still worth knowing. They still give us a clearer picture of how the world works, which tells us in turn what we can and cannot do. According to the leaked paper, Google has taught us a new fact about the world, a deep fact about our capabilities. If that’s true we should be impressed, even without new technology.