Quantum Computational Supremacy and Its Applications

by Prof. Scott Aaronson (UT Austin, US)

Thursday 30 Jul 2020, 16:30 → 17:30 Europe/Zurich

Remote only (CERN)

Last fall, a team at Google announced the first-ever demonstration of "quantum computational supremacy"---that is, a clear quantum speedup over a classical computer for some task---using a 53-qubit programmable superconducting chip called Sycamore.  Google's accomplishment drew on a decade of research in my field of quantum complexity theory.  This talk will discuss questions like: what exactly was the (contrived) problem that Sycamore solved?  How does one verify the outputs using a classical computer?  And how confident are we that the problem is classically hard---especially in light of subsequent counterclaims by IBM and others?  I'll end with a possible application that I've been developing for Google's experiment: namely, the generation of trusted public random bits, for use (for example) in cryptocurrencies.

Recording

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