By BigGo Finance
Publication Date: 2026-09-30 05:55:00
The IBM quantum processor completed in 19 seconds a calculation estimated to take 110 years on the world’s fastest supercomputer. The achievement is particularly significant because it represents the first demonstration of quantum advantage using a commercial processor accessible to ordinary users via the cloud, rather than specialized laboratory equipment.
A research team led by Tigran Sedrakyan, a theoretical condensed matter physicist at the U.S. quantum software company BlueQubit, conducted a Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) experiment using IBM’s 120-qubit superconducting quantum processor, “Nighthawk r2.” The results were posted last week on arXiv, the preprint server, and have not yet undergone peer review.
The researchers selected 61 qubits and applied random circuits for up to 40 cycles. The most meaningful results emerged at 36 cycles, under which conditions 918 two-qubit gates were used. Nighthawk r2 took 19 seconds to generate 1 million samples.
Random circuit sampling…