Researchers at Google say that they have achieved ‘quantum supremacy’, in which a computer harnessing the properties of sub-atomic particles did a far better job of solving a problem than the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Google said it has built a computer that has  reached “quantum supremacy,” performing a computation in 200 seconds that would take the fastest supercomputers about 10,000 years. The results of Google’s tests, which were conducted using a quantum chip it developed in-house, were published in the scientific journal Nature . “This achievement is the result of years of research and the dedication of many people,” Google engineering director Hartmut Neven said in a blog post. “It’s also the beginning of a new journey: figuring out how to put this technology to work. We’re working with the research community and have open-sourced tools to enable others to work alongside us to identify new applications.”

Given the task of finding a pattern in a seemingly random series of numbers, Google's quantum computer produced an answer in 3 minutes and 20 seconds. It estimates that the Summit supercomputer here at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee would take 10,000 years to complete the task. According to Google, such a huge win fulfils the accepted definition of supremacy. Simply put, this entails solving a computing task that a conventional computer would struggle to, or never, complete.

The idea behind quantum computing is to exponentially improve the processing speed and power of computers to be able to simulate large systems, driving advances in physics, chemistry and other fields. Rather than storing information in binary 0s or 1s like classical computers, quantum computers rely on “qubits”, which can be both 0 and 1 simultaneously, dramatically increasing the amount of information that can be encoded.