UW ECE Lytle Lecture 2020: Scott Aaronson on Quantum Supremacy

Quantum Computational Supremacy and Its Applications

Scott Aaronson – Professor, University of Texas at Austin; Director, Quantum Information Center at UT Austin
Thursday, November 19, 2020 | 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. PST

Scott Aaronson is the David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and the director of the Quantum Information Center at UT Austin. He received his bachelor’s from Cornell University and his PhD from UC Berkeley. Before joining UT Austin, he spent nine years as a professor in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Aaronson’s research in theoretical computer science has focused mainly on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers. His first book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He received the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States PECASE Award, and the Tomassoni-Chisesi Prize in Physics.

Abstract
Last fall, a team at Google announced the first-ever demonstration of “quantum computational supremacy”—that is, a clear quantum speedup over a classical computer for some task—using a 53-qubit programmable superconducting chip called Sycamore. Google’s accomplishment drew on a decade of research in my field of quantum complexity theory. This talk will discuss questions like: what exactly was the (contrived) problem that Sycamore solved? How does one verify the outputs using a classical computer? And how confident are we that the problem is classically hard—especially in light of subsequent counterclaims by IBM and others? I’ll end with a possible application that I’ve been developing for Google’s experiment: namely, the generation of trusted public random bits, for use (for example) in cryptocurrencies.