The competition that different countries and companies are leading to achieve quantum supremacy changes leader and from China they claim to have overtaken Google. Quantum computing will change the world to a degree that is difficult to imagine and its effects are expected to be great shortly in multiple fields .
It is used to research vaccines, but also to improve the world of finance, arms and others such as espionage that will be difficult to control. Therefore, owning the most powerful computer is more than just an anecdote .
For some time that Google claimed to have quantum supremacy with a computer able to finish in second process that would take 20,000 years to reach the 53 qubits . But the discussion about whether or not this supremacy belongs to Google seems to be over after the information published in Science .
At Hefei University of Science and Technology in China, they have developed a quantum computer that surpasses all known brands so far. This is called Jiuzhang and the figures achieved are intimidating .
To get an idea of what Jiuzhang means, the creators claim that it is much faster than Google’s, specifically 10 billion times faster. And billions of times more than a normal supercomputer.
Building Jiuzhang has been a major challenge as it starts from a totally different technology from the one proposed so far, instead of using metal superconductors, this team is based on the manipulation of photons . These particles of light would serve to multiply the results in an amazing way by traveling randomly in any direction within the created circuit.
According to Jian-Wei Pan, one of the computer’s developers, ” We have shown that we can use photons, the fundamental unit of light, to test quantum computational power far beyond the classical counterpart, ” they collect in 20 Minutes .
But there is a problem with this project that was created with the objective of sampling bosons: it cannot yet be programmed for other types of practices . Although once the milestone has been achieved, it is now a matter of starting to investigate in other directions using Jiuzhang as a base.
In any case, the achievements made are very important and draw a new line to overcome in order to achieve quantum supremacy . We will see who is the next to assault her and how long it takes to achieve it.
