Google has big plans for quantum computing. The company has come up with a strategy for demonstrating quantum supremacy, the claim that quantum computers can perform tasks that no current computers can. While it’s widely assumed that we will eventually reach quantum supremacy, nobody has done it yet because current quantum computers can only run a small number of specialised algorithms.

Their plan is based on simulating coin flips. An ordinary computer does this by storing two numbers and choosing one of them at random each time. To simulate 50 coin tosses, it just selects 50 times in a row.

This is simple with regular coins, but if the coins behave like particles obeying the laws of quantum mechanics, things get more complicated.

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