IBM Says Google's Quantum Leap Was a Quantum Flop

Technical quarrels between quantum computing experts rarely escape the field's rarified community. Late Monday, though, IBM's quantum team picked a highly public fight with Google. In a technical paper and blogpost, IBM took aim at potentially history-making scientific results accidentally leaked from a collaboration between Google and NASA last month. That draft paper claimed Google had reached a milestone dubbed "quantum supremacy"--a kind of drag race in which a quantum computer proves able to do something a conventional computer can't. Monday, Big Blue's quantum PhD's said Google's claim of quantum supremacy was flawed.