They finally did it. After years—no, decades—of declaring their hopes and dreams with hardly any practical results, researchers in the quantum computing community have delivered on a promise. Or have they?

Last week, news leaked that researchers at Google and other institutions had solved a problem on a quantum computer 1 billion times faster than a classical computer. Google did not respond to a request for comment, but according to a draft manuscript describing the experiment, they have realized “quantum supremacy,” an achievement that “heralds the advent of a much-anticipated computing paradigm.”

The reactions from the rest of the quantum community, however, have been downright contradictory. Read More

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