Physicists in China challenge Google’s ‘quantum advantage’

Amazing stuff! 

"A team in China claims to have made the first definitive demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’ — exploiting the counter-intuitive workings of quantum mechanics to perform computations that would be prohibitively slow on classical computers. They have used beams of laser light to perform a computation which had been mathematically proven to be practically impossible on normal computers. The team achieved within a few minutes what would take half the age of Earth on the best existing supercomputers.  ... [The researcher] adds that the calculation that they carried out — called the boson-sampling problem — is not just a convenient vehicle for demonstrating quantum advantage, but has potential practical applications in graph theory, quantum chemistry and machine learning. ..."

" ... “This is the first independent confirmation of Google’s claim that you really can achieve quantum supremacy,” ...
The result does boost the profile of photonic quantum computers, which haven’t always received as much attention as other technologies ..."

"... We perform Gaussian boson sampling by sending 50 indistinguishable single-mode squeezed states into a 100-mode ultralow-loss interferometer with full connectivity and random matrix—the whole optical setup is phase-locked—and sampling the output using 100 high-efficiency single-photon detectors. The obtained samples are validated against plausible hypotheses exploiting thermal states, distinguishable photons, and uniform distribution. The photonic quantum computer generates up to 76 output photon clicks, which yields an output state-space dimension of 1030 and a sampling rate that is ~1014 faster than using the state-of-the-art simulation strategy and supercomputers. ..."

Physicists in China challenge Google’s ‘quantum advantage’ Photon-based quantum computer does a calculation that ordinary computers might never be able to do.

The new light-based quantum computer Jiuzhang has achieved quantum supremacy A second type of quantum device performed a calculation impossible for a traditional computer

Quantum advantage demonstrated using Gaussian boson sampling A optical circuit has performed a quantum computation called “Gaussian boson sampling” (GBS) 100 trillion times faster than a supercomputer could, according to researchers in China.

Here is the respective research paper:

Quantum computational advantage using photons (open access)