China’s New Quantum Computer Has One Million Times The Power Of Google’s
In July this year, a group in China showed that it has the world’s most powerful quantum computer, finally leapfrogging Google, which declared to have achieved quantum supremacy back in 2019. Since then, China was touting a super-advanced 66-qubit quantum supercomputer called “Zuchongzhi” as one contender against Google’s fifty-four-qubit Sycamore processor.
But while Google’s quantum computers have not improved noticeably since then, China, on the other side, never slowed down, coming up with more potent quantum processors.
According to a current research published in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters and Science Bulletin, physicists in China assert they’ve constructed two quantum computers with performance speeds that much outrival competitors in the US or, without a doubt, anywhere in the world– debuting a superconducting machine along with a faster unit that uses light photons to obtain unprecedented results.
What sets quantum computer from China apart?
To remember, China launched the world’s first quantum satellite in 2016 and the biggest land-based quantum communications network in 2019. Despite having been a step or 2 behind the West in quantum computer technology, it never stopped trying and innovating.
The latest revelation is interesting because the light-based Jiuzhang 2 can calculate in 1 millisecond, a task that would take the globe’s fastest conventional computer up to thirty trillion yrs. It typically has a narrower field of applications but can reach a velocity of 100 sextillions (one followed by twenty-three zeros) times faster than the biggest conventional computers.
Jiuzhang two is actually an upgrade of a machine built by Pan’s team last year uses photons, each one carrying a qubit– the fundamental unit of quantum information. Lead researcher with the Jiuzhang project, Lu Chaoyang, highlighted that they “have actually increased the number of photons from 76 to 113, (the recent machine) is billions of billions of times faster than supercomputers.“
Then there is Zuchongzhi 2– an upgrade from an earlier machine launched three months ago that can run a calculation task 1 million times more complex than Sycamore, lead scientist Pan Jianwei said. Unfortunately, despite their speed efficiencies, these machines will not be changed by common computers any time quickly. Currently, they work just in a protected environment for short periods on highly specific tasks, and also, they make a lot of mistakes.
The next step
” In the next step, we wish to achieve quantum mistake correction with 4 to 5 years of hard work,” Pan stated during an interview with the research group with China’s state-owned CCTV. Additionally, he claims that it is feasible to “explore the utilize of some dedicated quantum computers or quantum simulators to resolve some of the most important scientific questions with practical worth, based on the technology of quantum mistake correction.”.
Pan noted that the circuits of the Zuchongzhi need to be cooled to very reduced temperatures to allow optimal performance for a complex task called random walk, which is a design that corresponds to the tactical movements of pieces on a chessboard. According to the South China Morning Post, the design assumes that the movement of a chess piece can be totally random, without any association with previous moves.
In classic computers, the process is difficult to simulate because it requires a huge amount of calculation based on complex formulas, but it becomes easy with the help of quantum physics. Other applications range from predicting stock prices to calculating genetic mutations, forming new materials, and air flows in hypersonic flight at Mach five or beyond.
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