(LiveScience) Hartmut Neven, the director of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at Google first noticed the the spookily fast, “doubly exponential rate” that quantum processors are improving, or getting faster at processing calculations, relative to regular computers. The phenomenon he observed is not called “Neven’s Law” and means that processing power grows by a factor of 2^2^1 (4), then 2^2^2 (16), then 2^2^3 (256), then 2^2^4 (65,536), and so on. The numbers get mind-bogglingly huge very, very fast. Doubly-exponential growth is so huge, it’s hard to find anything that grows so quickly in the natural world.
Moore’s Law, which for several decades governed silicon-chip-based computers, dictated that computing power would double every two years.
Not everyone is convinced that quantum supremacy is here. Andrew Childs, the co-director of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science at the University of Maryland, recently pointed out that silicon computers are also improving quickly, and he doubts that quantum computing could actually be improving at a doubly-exponential rate.
Moore’s Law Joined by Neven’s Law in the Quantification of Processing Power
