alt Hacker News>Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
A much simpler explanation is that your benchmark is severely flawed.
"Severely flawed" is a matter of interpretation, and I don't want to argue for or against.
But to put into context, these numbers are likely accurate, but represent the time it would take for a very naive classical algorithm (possibly brute-force, I am unsure).
For example, the previous result claimed it would take Summit 10,000 years to do the same calculation as the Sycamore quantum chip. However, other researchers were able to reproduce results classically using tensor-network-based methods in 14.5 days using a "relatively small cluster". [1]
[1] G. Kalachev, P. Panteleev, P. Zhou, and M.-H. Yung, “Classical sampling of random quantum circuits with bounded fidelity,” arXiv.org, https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.15083 (accessed Dec. 9, 2024).