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Physics

Google’s quantum supremacy algorithm has found its first practical use

By Leah Crane

13 December 2019

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

A quantum computing chip from Google. The firm has now made practical use of a quantum algorithm

Google

Google is putting its supreme algorithm to work. In October, the company announced that they had reached quantum supremacy – the point at which a quantum computer can complete a task that no classical computer could practically achieve – with an algorithm that could verify that a given set of numbers was randomly distributed. Now, that algorithm is finding its first practical use as a random number generator.

Alan Ho at Google announced this new application at the Q2B conference in California on 12…

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