A Chinese research team has surpassed Google, building a quantum computer that completed a calculation in just over an hour that would take classical

China demonstrates most powerful quantum computer

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2021-07-06 12:30:09

A Chinese research team has surpassed Google, building a quantum computer that completed a calculation in just over an hour that would take classical computers more than eight years to perform.

It’s the latest milestone in a line of exciting quantum computing developments across the last two years. In that time, researchers across the world have finally reached the long-sought-after ‘quantum advantage’ – the point at which quantum computing can solve a problem that would take an impractical amount of time for classical computing.

A team from Google first achieved the milestone in 2019 using superconducting qubits (which rely on the flow of current to perform computation), followed by a team from China in 2020 that upped the ante by using photonic qubits (which are based on light and have the potential for faster operation).

Now, another Chinese team (but led by the same researcher – Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai) has outperformed Google again.