China Claims It's Achieved 'Quantum Supremacy' With The World's Fastest Quantum Computer

 A team of Chinese scientists has developed the foremost powerful quantum computer within the world, capable of engaging at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world's fastest supercomputers.

In 2019, Google said it had built the primary machine to attain "quantum supremacy," the primary to outperform the world's best supercomputers at quantum calculation, Live Science previously reported. (IBM disputed Google's claim at the time.)

The Chinese team, based primarily at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang, is 10 billion times faster than Google's. an outline of Jiuzhang and its feat of calculation was published December 3 within the journal Science.

Assuming both claims interference, Jiuzhang would be the second quantum computer to realize quantum supremacy anywhere within the world.

China has invested heavily in quantum computing, with Xi Jinping's government spending US$10 billion on the country's National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences, NDTV reported.

The country is additionally a world leader in quantum networking, where data encoded using quantum physics is transmitted across great distances, as Live Science has reported.

Quantum computers can exploit the weird mathematics governing the quantum world to outperform classical computers on certain tasks, as Live Science reported.

Where classical computers perform calculations using bits, which may have one amongst two states (typically represented by a 1 or a 0), quantum bits, or qubits, can exist in many countries simultaneously. this permits them to unravel problems more quickly than classical computers.

But while the theories predicting that quantum computing would beat classical computing are around for many years, building practical quantum computers has proved far more challenging. 

The Chinese computer makes its calculations (limited to particular questions about the behavior of sunshine particles) using optical circuits.

Google's device, Sycamore, uses superconducting materials on a chip and more nearly resembles the fundamental structure of classical computers.

Neither would be particularly useful on its own as a computer and therefore the Chinese device was built to unravel only one kind of problem.

To test Jiuzhang, the researchers assigned it a "Gaussian boson sampling" (GBS) task, where the pc calculates the output of a fancy circuit that uses light. That output is expressed as a listing of numbers. (Light is formed of particles referred to as photons, which belongs to a category of particles called bosons.) 

Success is measured in terms of the number of photons detected. Jiuzhaigou, which itself is an optical circuit, detected a maximum of 76 photons in one test and a mean of 43 across several tests.

Its calculation time to provide the list of numbers for every experimental run was about 200 seconds, while the fastest Chinese supercomputer, TaihuLight, would have taken 2.5 billion years to gain an identical result.

That suggests the quantum computer can do GBS 100 trillion times faster than a classical supercomputer.

This doesn't mean that China includes a fully practical quantum computer yet, in keeping with Xinhua. China's device is specialized and mostly useful as a tool for doing GBS. But it is a major milestone on the way there.