Up front: As far as we can tell, it’s true. After a quick glance at the research paper and a gander at the peer response it’s apparent the Chinese team’s managed to do something extraordinary here. Here’s the jargon from the paper itself: Basically that all says the researchers built a quantum computing machine that uses light to perform a very specific task (Boson sampling) for the sole purpose of demonstrating and measuring its effectiveness. Background: The reason why this matters is because quantum computers can, theoretically, solve really hard problems. We’re talking the kinds of problems that physicists and computer scientists estimate it would take a classical machine thousands of years to solve. In 2018 Google claimed it’d developed the first machine that could demonstrate “quantum advantage.” That just means it allegedly made a quantum computer capable of doing something a classical computer either couldn’t do, or couldn’t do in a reasonable amount of time. Google claimed its system, a 53-qubit machine rocking a quantum chip called “Sycamore,” could solve a specific problem that a supercomputer could not. Unfortunately for Google, IBM was quick to dispute that claim. According to Big Blue, it can solve the same problem on one of its classical supercomputers in a mere matter of days – and that’s with algorithms that already existed at the time of Google’s announcement. Quick take: What China’s done is completely different than what Google did. In essence, China’s built a machine that can only run the experiment it’s described as demonstrating quantum supremacy through. In other words: it doesn’t actually solve any problems, which makes its designation as a computer somewhat honorary. Google’s machine, on the other hand, is ‘programmable.’ This means it could, theoretically, be adapted to solve one or more problems. That doesn’t mean what China’s done isn’t a breakthrough. Pushing the limits of what quantum science can achieve is the goal of everyone working in the field. The various labs around the globe working on building quantum computing machines use different approaches because, while the future is bright for the field, we’re still taking the first theoretical baby-steps toward useful quantum computing. China’s methods may have yielded the latest breakthrough, but as Lu Chaoyang, the professor leading the experiment told The Financial Times: For more information on quantum computing check out our primer here.
