A Quantum Computer Just Did in 19 Seconds What Could Take a Supercomputer 110 Years

IBM’s Quantum Nighthawk chip. Credit: IBM Imagine tossing 61 coins at once — except the coins can influence one another in strange quantum ways, and before every toss you scramble them through dozens of randomly chosen operations. Now repeat that experiment one million times and record the resulting strings of zeros and ones (heads and tails). That, in simplified terms, is what researchers asked IBM’s Nighthawk r2 quantum processor to do. The experiment is called random-circuit sampling, and it is not meant to solve anything genuinely practical in the real world. Instead, scientists use it as a stress test: can a quantum computer produce patterns of results that would be extraordinarily difficult for an ordinary computer to reproduce? In the…