China unveils quantum computer that’s one quadrillion times faster than existing supercomputers
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-unveils-quantum-computer-one-085016128.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEJFmjFPUYtMuuvlnm-vfoiHhwWuwSG23oJnHEbhhDUUPokFMSLssDNhHgGLDqgaO70UdUwToATE8LO-76xaN1Xw18oON6ASSJolDxV2GGBIAJKp-FFmszRFcg68Mv7obA_ozB0ckbGFTo6wV3LXIM9qr25YAnCWUoa0ABQw79ls
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Submission Statement:
Chinese scientists have unveiled a new prototype superconducting quantum computer which they claim would lay the groundwork for a whole new era of processors.
Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) say the quantum computer operates at a speed that is a quadrillion (10^15) times faster than the fastest supercomputer currently available.
The quantum processor, described in a new study in the journal Physical Review Letters, was also found to be a million times faster than Google’s latest experiment.
Scientists across the world have been attempting to build quantum computers capable of performing tasks infeasible for classical computers.
One of the tasks that has become something like a golden standard for testing and comparing quantum computers is what’s called the “random circuit sampling” (RCS) problem.
“This process [RCS] has become a focal point of intensive research due to its capacity to underscore the computational superiority of quantum systems,” scientists explained.
intel also just released their own quantum computing chip. the future is here
When Google made the headlines last December, I heard people say that RCS is a shitty example because it’s a kind of benchmark that’s specifically meant for quantum computers to excel, and that it doesn’t translate to any general purpose use.
It seems that it’s the same case here. But anyone with knowledge in it can confirm.
Obligatory “for VERY VERY specific calculations that have VERY specific usecases”.
lol this sounds like a toddler bragging about something. Oh yeah?! well I made a quantum computer that’s a Chazillion times faster than yours! 😏
Only a quadrillion?
Given the news comes from Chinese sources, I was sure it would be at least a nonillion times faster.
I’m pretty sure the term “faster” here is a misnomer. Can anyone explain further?
If they aren’t making the transistors physically switch faster, or making the electrons move faster, it’s not faster, it is *more efficient* at solving a certain type of problem, which classical computers kind of suck at.
Except that it isn’t really faster.
Quantum computers work through wave interference, where the amplitudes of multiple waves interfere, resulting in wrong answers cancelling each other out. If you are able to encode a problem as competing waveforms, you can leverage such a platform. Otherwise, it’s not that useful.
Take, for example, the traveling salesman problem, where a salesman is given a list of cities and must compute the shortest route visiting each city once. Each city would be connected to its adjacent neighbors via roads. It’s a connected graph problem. It’s an problem where the number of different options that you need to test grows exponentially for every city you add. 5 cities would have, at worst, 32 tests. If you added another 5 cities, you’re up to 1024 tests. Add another 10? You’re up to over a million. And another ten for 30 cities? You’re over a billion comparisons.
A clever individual figured out that you could have DNA solve the problem by creating strands that modeled roads between cities. Each strand would have the two cities they connected with encoded at each end, and the length of the road was reflected in the length of the strand. They then created millions of copies of all the strands and put them in a beaker with enzymes that would find matching cities and stitch them together. The result of a problem with several hundred cities was found in a matter of minutes by using PCR to identify the shortest strand with all cities represented. It would have taken all the computers in the world until the heat death of the universe to come up with a solution.
It was a brilliant tech demo, but DNA hasn’t taken over our computing infrastructure. Because the types of problems that can be solved in this way are limited to narrow, specific classes. Solving problems with wave interference is basically the same type of constraint. It’s an entirely different method of computing, but it only applies to a limited number of problem classes.
These random noise generators are on another level. Soon we’ll have random noise generators that generate more random noise than can be verified in the lifetime of the universe.
Don’t worry, Trump will keep America competitive by closing our colleges and universities.
And cancelling R&D funding.
And shutting down public K-12, to make sure there are brilliant minds in the pipeline.