A supercomputer takes 10,000 years to calculate in 3 minutes and 20 seconds. Google's paper claims it has achieved quantum supremacy

The paper, published on a NASA website, said the quantum processor solved a calculation that would have taken the "top" astrophysicist 10,000 years to complete in just 3 minutes and 20 seconds.

If true, it would prove that "quantum supremacy" has been achieved. This concept, proposed by John Preskill, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in 2012, states that a quantum computer can perform a computing task that no current classical computer can perform within a given time.

However, Preskill predicted that quantum supremacy would be achieved by a 50-bit quantum computer, and Google used 53 qubits this time, with a processor called Sycamore.

The article was deleted after being published on NASA's website. Fortune magazine quoted a Google source as saying that the paper was withdrawn because the research had not yet been peer-reviewed.

Compared to all known classical algorithms, this huge speedup means that quantum supremacy has been achieved in computing tasks, heralding a long-awaited computing paradigm," the researchers wrote in the paper.

According to optimistic estimates by Google scientists, after achieving the milestone of quantum supremacy, the power of quantum computers will grow exponentially, driving industry development more strongly than traditional Moore's Law.

The Google quantum team, led by John Martinis, an experimental physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, first predicted that it would reach quantum supremacy by the end of 2017. But the 72-qubit quantum computing system that Google unveiled last March has proven too difficult to control.

Eventually, Google adapted the system to design a 53-qubit system, codenamed Sycamore. The system was tasked with proving that a random number generator was truly random. Although the work had few practical applications, Google researchers said other uses for the computing power "include machine learning, materials science, and chemistry."