Google Supremacy, Iran Exposed, and Germany's Debut

Google has achieved quantum supremacy (again) with its new and improved quantum computer, and it is performing calculations that would take the best supercomputers 47 years (!!!) to complete. Google made a similar claim in 2019 about their Sycamore processor, but this latest Sycamore model runs on 70 qubits, an improvement on the previous version with 53 qubits.

**Want to know more about qubits? Check out our recent Twitter thread here!

Iran recently made headlines with its claim of successfully developing and deploying quantum computing products for military purposes. However, it’s been revealed that the gold-plaqued board showcased was actually an off-the-shelf FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) development board (available on Amazon). Iran's research vice chancellor for Imam Khomeini University admitted that there was no actual quantum processing involved in their announcement and blamed the false perception on the country's media.

Google recently published a paper discussing the challenges and trade-offs involved in error-corrected quantum computing. The study focuses on understanding the computational cost of quantum processing experiments, considering noise and the choice of observable. The authors generalize a framework used in Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) experiments to estimate the computational cost. They also explore the relationship between gate error, fidelity of observables, and computational cost in the context of quantum information scrambling. The findings highlight the exponential decrease in fidelity with the effective quantum volume and the corresponding increase in classical computational cost with the effective area.