But perhaps more significantly, the company invited the press to its quantum computing lab, talked about its plans, and gave us time to chat with the researchers behind the work.
But he found it hard to resist the topic entirely, and the other people who talked with reporters were more than happy to expand on Neven's discussion.
Google's Sergio Boixo explained the experiment in detail, describing how a random source was used to configure the gates among the qubits, after which a measurement of the system's output was made. While on a normal computer the output would be the same given the same starting configuration, qubits can have values that make their measured output probabilistic, meaning that the result of any one measurement can't be predicted.
But as the total number of qubits goes up, it becomes impossible to do so within the lifetime of existing supercomputing hardware.
When asked, however, Google engineers indicated that errors would alter the probability distribution in a way they could detect when run with a moderate number of qubits).
Google staff admitted that it was a problem specifically chosen because quantum computers can produce results even if they have a high error rate.
But error corrections require more of a conversation, with constant sampling of the qubit state and corrective commands issued when needed.
Original article