In what has been hailed as a computing milestone, a team of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China has achieved quantum supremacy thanks to a device that can manipulate tiny particles of light.
Dubbed Jiuzhang, the system performed a quantum computation called "Gaussian boson sampling", which has been shown to be intractable for classical computers. Quantum supremacy is achieved when a quantum device is proven to be able to carry out a task that a classical computer would find impossible, or take too long to complete.
While Jiuzhang achieved Gaussian boson sampling in just 200 seconds, the researchers estimated that the same calculation would take the world's fastest supercomputer[1], Fugaku, 600 million years to complete.
Quantum supremacy has only been claimed once before. Last year, Google's researchers showed off a 54-qubit processor[2] that they said could run a test computation in 200 seconds – a calculation that, according to the research, would take the world's biggest supercomputers 10,000 years to complete.
Qubits come with unprecedented computational power due to their ability to exist in a dual quantum state, and therefore to carry out many calculations at one. Researchers expect that, armed with enough stable qubits, quantum computers will shake up industries[3] ranging from AI to finance through transportation and supply-chains.
The crux of the challenge consists of creating and maintaining enough qubits to make a quantum computer useful, and there are different ways to do so. The quantum technology developed by Google, for example, is entirely different from Jiuzhang's set up: the search giant, for its part, is investing in metal-based superconducting qubits.
This is also IBM's preferred quantum technique, and both tech giants have poured large sums of money into superconducting circuits to push quantum computing research.
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