IBM quantum computer completes 110-year supercomputer task in 19 seconds

The experiment used Nighthawk r2, IBM's latest quantum processor, and was led by Tigran Sedrakyan, a theoretical physicist at U.S.-based quantum computing company BlueQubit, according to science news outlet ScienceAlert.

The results were published Sept. 23 on arXiv, an online repository for scientific research papers. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Nighthawk r2 has 120 qubits, the quantum equivalent of the bits used to store and process information in conventional computers, according to IBM. The processor can be accessed commercially through the company's cloud platform.

For the experiment, the researchers used 61 qubits and put them through increasingly complex operations. The processor generated one million results in just 19 seconds, according to the study.

The test used a method known as random-circuit sampling, in which quantum computers perform increasingly complex calculations that become extremely difficult for conventional computers to reproduce.

Based on the performance of Frontier, one of the world's fastest until supercomputer in the U.S., the researchers estimated that reproducing the result using conventional computing methods would take about 110 years.

The figure is an estimate based on a particular method of reproducing the quantum experiment on a conventional computer, rather than an actual test on Frontier, and more efficient algorithms could significantly reduce the estimated time.