THE SINE QUA NON OF 5G TECHNOLOGIES: QUANTUM
5gvirusnews News Centre Nur-Sultan/ Nurfer TERCAN / 20 December 2020
The Chinese quantum computer prototype leads the world in computing capabilities.
A research team led by professors Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang of the University of Science and Technology of China recently built a quantum computer prototype named “Jiuzhang” and stated that, through it, up to 76 photons were detected.
The achievement was the result of the joint efforts of the research team, the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology and the National Research Centre of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology.
Jiuzhang can process 50 million samples in 200 seconds with Gaussian boson sampling (GBS), a classical simulation algorithm, compared with 600 million years for the most powerful supercomputer in the world. This breakthrough shows that China has for the first time achieved quantum computational advantage, or “quantum supremacy”, making it the second country in the world to succeed in this.
Jiuzhang’s research team published its achievement on 4 December in Science, one of the world’s top academic journals.
“Quantum supremacy” arises when a new quantum computer prototype outperforms the most powerful classical computers in terms of computing power in carrying out a particular task. The result also proves that the new quantum computer prototype will probably outperform conventional computers and bring further progress in many other fields in the future.
Peter Zoller, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and also a laureate of the Wolf Prize in Physics, stated that one of the most important problems at the frontier of quantum science is using quantum devices to solve complex problems and to demonstrate quantum advantages. Naturally, he recalled the Dirac Medal here.
Zoller believes that Pan’s team has taken research on the size, scalability and prospects for practical application of quantum systems to a new level. Pan, saying, “In the age of big data, the volume of data created in the world is growing exponentially, doubling every two years,” added that such a huge amount of data will mean nothing unless it is mined. Stating that at present the development of computers is being held back by the traditional development model and that supercomputers tend to consume large amounts of energy, Pan noted that Jiuzhang was designed to improve computing capabilities without consuming more energy.
The research and development of quantum computers has become one of the greatest challenges at the forefront of world science and technology and a focus of global efforts.
In 2019, Google created a 53-qubit quantum computer known as Sycamore, which was far faster in processing a mathematical algorithm than what was then the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The computer became the first in the world to achieve “quantum supremacy”.
Lu stated that the new quantum computer developed by the Chinese research team surpasses Sycamore in three respects – including computing speed, environmental adaptability and computing power in problems involving larger samples.
While Jiuzhang outperforms supercomputers with both small and large quantities of samples, Sycamore could outstrip supercomputers only where there was a small quantity of samples. It is as if Google’s quantum computer can leave supercomputers behind in a sprint, but not in a marathon; Lu said that Jiuzhang is successful both in sprints and in long-distance races.
The Jiuzhang-based GBS algorithm has potential for application in fields such as graph theory, machine learning and quantum chemistry, which are regarded as the focus of research in the future.
According to Pan’s team, despite having strong computing power, Jiuzhang is at present only a “champion in a single field”.
Pan added, “We hope to develop a general-purpose quantum computer to solve more practical problems such as cryptanalysis, weather forecasting and drug design through efforts over the next 15 to 20 years.”
A reviewer for Science commented that Jiuzhang represents both a major breakthrough and a state-of-the-art experiment. Experiments on quantum advantages will not reach results easily. The competitive relationship between faster classical algorithms and constantly improving quantum computing hardware has been underlined. But in the end, quantum parallelism will produce a computing power that classical computers cannot match. Pan’s team hopes that its achievement will inspire more effort in the simulation of classical algorithms.
Keywords: Quantum Technology Wolf Prize in Physics
Translated from the Turkish original.