Hacking Reality

Google has demonstrated “quantum supremacy” by building a quantum computer that can compute things not possible to compute with an ordinary computer, no matter how large and fast.

I’m not a physicist, but here is how I think about it. We live in a universe that is consistent over space and time. There are laws of physics that appear to govern what happens at all scales, from subatomic to cosmological. Our current computers work within these laws. Collections of atoms can denote a binary zero or one, and energy flows enable switching and computation.

But what computes the laws of physics? The computation must be massive, since all particles and energy (and information) in the entire universe must be consistent with all others across time. The quantum entanglements of essentially infinite particle relationships across vast distances need to be maintained. Information flow is governed by the speed of light. Gravity, which doesn’t even fit into any of our current physics theories, must be computed as well.

The universe can’t compute itself—there isn’t sufficient capacity. There must be a much much bigger engine that computes what happens in our universe. We don’t know what is, but we can see evidence of it. Since this physics engine computes interactions in our universe, we can potentially hack this engine by carefully arranging matter in our universe so that the underlying engine computing our reality computes something useful for us. Since this engine is necessarily much more powerful than what we can build in our universe, we should be able to force computations to happen that are simply not possible with classical computers. That is what Google has demonstrated for the first time.

Google created a physical quantum computing device. It is very different from a normal computer. This device computed in 200 seconds what the most powerful supercomputer in the world would have needed 10,000 years to compute. It is just a demonstration, but a hugely important one. The human race now has the ability to hack the computation engine underlying our reality.

Google accomplished this last spring, and has already started expanding into more practical applications. From their blog post: “The Sycamore quantum computer is fully programmable and can run general-purpose quantum algorithms. Since achieving quantum supremacy results last spring, our team has already been working on near-term applications, including quantum physics simulation and quantum chemistry, as well as new applications in generative machine learning, among other areas.”

Google plans to put their quantum computer online for other researchers to experiment with. 

Link to Google’s blog post

Link to a video from Google

Link to Google’s paper in Nature