Fastest!
my country's quantum computer achieves global leadership in computing power
Xinhua News Agency, Hefei, December 4 (Reporters Xu Haitao and Zhou Chang) 200 seconds is just a short moment, 600 million years have already been vicissitudes of life.
On December 4, the University of Science and Technology of China announced that the school’s Pan Jianwei and others have successfully built a 76-photon quantum computing prototype "Nine Chapters". It only takes 200 seconds to solve the mathematical algorithm Gaussian Bose sampling, which is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer. It takes 600 million years.
This breakthrough made my country the second country in the world to achieve "quantum superiority".
"Quantum superiority is like a threshold. It means that when a new quantum computing prototype machine has a computing power that exceeds the strongest traditional computer on a certain problem, it proves that it has the possibility of surpassing in many ways in the future." said Lu Chaoyang, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China. Over the years, the international academic circles have paid close attention to and look forward to the arrival of this milestone turning point.
In September last year, the American company Google launched the 53-qubit computer "Platanus". It only took 200 seconds to calculate a mathematical algorithm. At that time, the world's fastest supercomputer "top" took 2 days, achieving "quantum superiority". ".
Recently, Pan Jianwei's team cooperated with the Shanghai Institute of Microsystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology to successfully build the "Nine Chapters" of 76 photon quantum computing prototypes.
Experiments show that when solving the Gaussian Bose sampling of 50 million samples, "Nine Chapters" takes 200 seconds, while the world's fastest supercomputer "Fuyue" takes 600 million years.
Equivalently, the calculation speed of "Nine Chapters" is 10 billion times faster than that of "Platanus", and it makes up for the technical loopholes of "Platanus" depending on the number of samples.
It is reported that the breakthrough of Pan Jianwei's team lasted 20 years, mainly to overcome the three major technical problems of high-quality photon source, high-precision phase lock, and large-scale interference.
"For example, it is easy for us to drink a sip of water each time, but it is very difficult to drink one water molecule each time." Pan Jianwei said, the photon source must ensure that only one photon is emitted each time, and each photon is exactly the same. challenge.
At the same time, the phase lock accuracy should be within the minus 9th power of 10, and the transmission error equivalent to a distance of 100 kilometers cannot exceed the diameter of a hair.
Compared with general-purpose computers, "Nine Chapters" are only "single champions."
But its super computing power has potential application value in the fields of graph theory, machine learning, quantum chemistry and so on.
On December 4, the international academic journal "Science" published the result, and the reviewers evaluated it as "a most advanced experiment" and "a major achievement."