The absolute advantage of light quantum chips: Shorten 9,000 years of computation to 36 millionths of a second

The power of quantum computers is increasingly asserted in the computing industry. Most recently, the world's fastest computer chips today have been beaten by a light quantum chip by researchers from Xanadu Quantum Technologies, in Toronto, Canada in their ability to solve a problem. difficult.

According to the researchers' paper, it took supercomputers and current algorithms 9,000 years to compute this problem - but the researchers' Borealis quantum chip completed it in just 36 microseconds (each microsecond equals 1/1,000,000th of a second).

The problem the researchers talked about was Gaussian Boson Sampling (GBS). This task requires the computer to generate a sample from the probability distribution of single-photon measurements at the output of the circuit – and if you find it meaningless, it is, because even fast computers It is almost impossible for the world to understand and calculate it.

Xanadu's Quantum Computer.

The BGS task has certain advantages that make it non-discriminatory specifically for quantum settings, so BGS has become a standard tool for calculating how much faster a quantum computer is. compared to traditional computers.

While traditional computers use a binary system (0 and 1 to represent off and on), quantum computers process up to 3 data units using qubits (0, 1 and "both"). As a result, they are exceptionally fast as they can calculate the probability of each solution before using it. Meanwhile, today's traditional computers have to test each solution to determine if it's right or wrong.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned researchers' Borealis chip is a light quantum chip, as it uses continuous pulses of light to transmit quantum information. Even compared to the world of quantum chips, this is a real monster in terms of performance when there are 219 qubits, of which 129 are used for this research.

Borealis' cloud design makes it easier for researchers to access.

The researchers believe that the light quantum chip will be the most used architecture in the future as it has much greater scalability than other solutions.

The Borealis chip is far more advanced in that each quantum gate is programmable, and even though other chips are equipped with this function, they have not yet achieved quantum supremacy (which has far superior computing power). compared to traditional computers).

The researchers believe this work is an important milestone in advancing the development of quantum computers. "This work is an important milestone on the road to creating a true quantum computer, validating the key technological features of photonics as a foundation for this goal."

While all is extremely promising, especially the unparalleled performance of this light quantum chip, the GBS task has no real application and finding a common application in practice is for the most part. for quantum chips at the present time is even more difficult. Even though the UK Ministry of Defense recently purchased the first quantum computer for testing, it could be years before such computers are deployed on a large scale.

It's also part of the reason Xanadu is bringing the computing power of Borealis to the cloud so that researchers around the globe can more easily access it and create real-world applications based on the cloud. its usual.

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