Photo: Sina Weibo

 
Chinese scientists on Friday announced they have built a quantum computer prototype, via which a maximum of 76 photons were detected.

This achievement marks China’s first milestone on the path to full-scale quantum computing — a quantum computational advantage (also known as “quantum supremacy”) — which indicates an overwhelming quantum computational speedup, Xinhua reported on Friday.

Named Jiuzhang after an ancient Chinese mathematical text, this new quantum computer can perform a calculation in 200 seconds with Gaussian boson sampling (GBS), a classical simulation algorithm. A similar calculation would take 600 million years on the world’s current classical supercomputers.

A quantum computer with 50 qubits is generally regarded as a key threshold for surpassing classical computers, said the People’s Daily on Friday.

Global Times