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

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 new experiment, researchers applied 36 rounds of operations to 61 quantum bits, or qubits, involving 918 two-qubit interactions. The processor then generated one million results in just 19 seconds.

What makes this unique

The important part is not that a quantum computer can spit out zeros and ones quickly. Any laptop can do that. The challenge is reproducing the same probability pattern created by the quantum circuit — the subtle way some bit strings become more likely than others after the qubits interact.