A group of Chinese scientists has developed the world's most powerful quantum computer, achieving quantum supremacy. It can perform a single task 100 trillion times faster than the best supercomputers. This is reported by the publication Science Alert.
Researchers at the Chinese University of science and technology in Hefei reported that their quantum computer, called Jiuzhang, is 10 billion times faster than Google's. In 2019, Google said it had built the world's first quantum computing machine, which surpassed the world's best supercomputers.
While classical computers perform calculations using bits that can take one of two States (1 or 0), quantum bits (qubits) can exist in a superposition of two States, which allows them to perform calculations faster than classical computers.
The Sycamore device created by Google is based on chips with superconductors, and the Jiuzhang uses optical circuits. To test the machine, we used the problem of Gaussian boson sampling or boson sampling, which calculates the probability distribution of the output state of photons when scattered by an interferometer.
The time to calculate the result for each experiment was about 200 seconds, while the fastest Chinese TaihuLight supercomputer would take 2.5 billion years. However, for now, Jiuzhang is highly specialized and can only be used for boson sampling.
