Revealed: Google's plan for quantum computer supremacy

SOMEWHERE in California, Google is building a device that will usher in a new era for computing. It's a quantum computer, the largest ever made, designed to prove once and for all that machines exploiting exotic physics can outperform the world's top supercomputers. And New Scientist has learned it could be ready sooner than anyone expected – perhaps even by the end of next year. The quantum computing revolution has been a long time coming. In the 1980s, theorists realised that a computer based on quantum mechanics had the potential to vastly outperform ordinary, or classical, computers at certain tasks.