‘Quantum Supremacy’: China Claims Supercomputer One Million Times Faster Than Record

A Chinese physicist claimed to have built a quantum computer that would leave Western competitors in the dust, but he and his team said they needed to “further verify” the claim.

Pan Jianwei, a physicist at the China University of Science and Technology, announced at a conference at Westlake University, Hangzhou, on September 5 that a new machine had recently achieved “quantum supremacy” a million times greater than the record. currently held by Sycamore. , a quantum computer built by Google.

Sycamore completed in about 200 seconds a calculation that would keep Earth’s fastest computer busy for 10,000 years, according to a paper published by Google researchers last year.

Pan’s claim was reported by Anhui Daily and other outlets on the mainland.

Pan’s team released a statement on Weibo on Tuesday saying they were “deeply concerned” by these reports because Pan had been quoted out of context.

The results were still preliminary and “there was no 100 percent guarantee until re-verification,” Pan said in the statement.

At the time of publishing this South China Morning Post report, Pan’s team had not released a document to provide further details on their work.

A quantum computer uses qubits or subatomic particles in various quantum states to perform many calculations at the same time. Some scientists believe the technology could one day be used to hack into a password-protected bank account, among other applications.

However, a general-purpose quantum computer could still be decades away. Most of the existing machines perform only very specific tasks and have nothing to do with code breaking.

Pan’s quantum computer, for example, simulates how light bounces through a chamber full of crystals. When a particle of light hits a crystal, it goes left or right and hits another crystal, and then another.

As the number of light particles increases, the situation becomes extremely complicated.

Simulating this process could drain the resources of the most powerful computer, but it would be much easier on a quantum computer.

When Pan’s team began building a device to perform this particular task, known as boson sampling, it could handle 10 qubits. They have now achieved 50 qubits, according to Pan.

Google’s Sycamore handles 53 qubits, but it was built with a different design, known as a “random circuit,” to cope with a different task.

Neither Pan nor his team explained how they compared the performance of the two machines.

Both were built to demonstrate “quantum supremacy,” or the idea that quantum computers could perform better than their conventional counterparts, at least in some specific tasks.

But the idea was not without controversy. IBM, for example, claimed that Google had exaggerated its claim by using an outdated algorithm that extended the runtime on supercomputers from two days to more than 10,000 years.

Pan led the development of the world’s first quantum satellite and the construction of the longest quantum communication network from Beijing to Shanghai that, in theory, could not be harnessed.

His team has received generous and consistent financial support from the Chinese government for nearly two decades to bring China’s quantum technology to a global leadership position.

A scientist on his team said they were under pressure to prove the value of the government’s investments.

“Not all fundamental research work has immediate application in sight,” said the physicist who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

A major challenge for quantum computing is that it generally needs to operate in extremely cold and isolated environments. Subatomic particles are fragile, short-lived, and prone to errors with even a small disturbance to the environment.

– South China Morning Mail