After a news leaked a month ago that Google's engineers could prove the so-called "quantum supremacy", the company has officially announced its success. In the main competitor, IBM, they are trying to reduce the importance of the event.
Quantum computers are one of the major areas of computer science development nowadays, as they promise to solve some types of computational problems that are too demanding for today's classic machines.
In operation, they use the rules of quantum mechanics, where the basic unit of information is not a bit, but a qubit: a quantum superposition of values zero and one, which is generally said to have values of zero and one at the same time, until measurements are made on it.
The point is that in a cluster of properly connected qubits, it's possible to perform an operation on all of the qubits simultaneously in one cycle, which implies unprecedented computational accelerations, since the performance of such a machine increases exponentially with the number of usable qubits.
