Is China leading the quantum computing race?
Key points…
+ Just last year a team from Google achieved what it called “quantum supremacy” when its quantum computer performed a calculation faster than a conventional computer could. Google’s John Martinis and Sergio Boixo in a blog post said “Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds, and from measurements in our experiment, we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output.”
However, Jiuzhang cannot be used immediately in real-life applications. It will need to work with a programmable chip to perform various calculations. On rumors about the threat, it poses to cryptocurrency, or any encryption used by finance, communication, and government systems currently; Jiuzhang is reported to be unable to solve the factoring problem that is crucial to decoding encrypted information.
+ And earlier this month, a team under the direction of Pan Jianwei at the University of Science and Technology in China (USTC), said its quantum computer succeeded in performing a calculation 100 trillion times faster than a conventional computer could — surpassing Google’s achievement by a factor of 10 billion, according to the Xinhua.
+ The state-run news agency said the researchers have built a quantum computer prototype that is able to detect up to 76 photons through Gaussian boson sampling, a standard simulation algorithm, citing research published in Science magazine. That’s exponentially faster than existing supercomputers.
Source: /TECHWIRE/ Asia. Dashveenjit Kaur, Is China leading the quantum computing race?
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