Zuchongzhi, Quantum Computer From China Breaks World Record

High speed computers are capable of solving complex mathematical problems in just a few minutes. (photo credit: Jake Walker/unsplash)

JAKARTA - A research team at the China University of Science and Technology and affiliated with various institutions in China, has reached a new milestone in the development of quantum computers. The group has written a paper describing its latest endeavor and has uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.

in 2019, a team at Google announced that they had achieved "quantum supremacy" with their Sycamore machine with a 54 qubit processor. The machine is claimed to be capable of performing calculations that take about 10,000 years to complete by traditional computers.

But the feat was soon surpassed by other teams from Honeywell and teams in China  The team in China used a different technique. The technique they use involves the use of photonic qubits. In this new endeavor, a new team from China, led by Jian-Wei Pan, who also led the previous team at the University of Science and Technology has reached a new milestone.

The new attempt was made with a programmable 2D computer called the Zuchongzhi—which is equipped to run 66 qubits. In their demonstration, the researchers, using only 56 qubits, were able to tackle a well-known computer problem. They sampled the output distribution of a random quantum circuit.

The task requires various computer skills involving mathematical analysis, matrix theory, certain computational complexities, and probability theory. The task is claimed to be roughly 100 times more challenging than the one performed by Sycamore two years ago.

Previous research has suggested the task, however, would take about eight years to be completed by conventional computers. However, Zuchongzhi completed the task in less than an hour and a half.

The team's achievements show that the Zuchongzhi machine is capable of handling more than one type of task. It also showed that adding just two more qubits than those used by Sycamore could increase the power of quantum computers exponentially.

But more importantly, these results show that computer scientists are moving closer to their real goal, namely the development of generalized quantum computers that can be used for several real-world applications that traditional computers could never handle.