The recent demonstration by the Chinese researchers suggests that the Asian country has developed the most powerful quantum computer in the world. To prove how fast the supercomputer is, these researchers completed a convoluted calculation that would normally take about eight years for a typical supercomputer to complete. And they managed to do so in about a little over an hour.
According to sources, the Zuchongzhi quantum computer is a 66-qubit machine, and the quantum computer from Google, its Sycamore chip, only features 53 qubits. In contrast, IBM’s Q System One chip packs 20 qubits. It’s not easy to pack qubits into chips and achieve the quantum mechanical superposition effect. However, what’s even harder is to ensure that they work correctly without any error.
As it stands, managing to pack 66 qubits together and make them operable without any error is a remarkable achievement. It’s amazing because adding several qubits to a quantum CPU will exponentially increase its performance.
Building a Quantum computer is not an easy task either; their chips need to be cooled down close to absolute zero (-273.15ºC), and this temperature must be maintained for smooth functionality. As such, it’s even harder to build quantum computers and use them for normal organizations.
Owing to all these difficulties, currently, quantum computers are mostly used for experiments with high-performance computing only by researchers and high-tech giants. So a future with Skynet is still a few hundred years ahead, hopefully, before we end up dead due to climate change.
The newly developed Zuchongzhi processor is much more versatile than its predecessor, the acclaimed Jiuzhang quantum chip. It’s more programmable than its predecessor and is also significantly more powerful. The researchers made a test where the new quantum processor was made to perform a random quantum circuit sampling task. It managed to complete the task in 1.2 hours, which takes Google’s Sycamore several hours to complete.
