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China Makes Quantum Leap In Developing Quantum Computer (scmp.com)
hackingbear writes: Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China created a quantum device, called a boson sampling machine, that can now carry out calculations for five photons, but at a speed 24,000 times faster than previous experiments. Pan Jianwei, the lead scientist on the project, said that though their device was already (only) 10 to 11 times faster at carrying out the calculations than the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, and the first transistor computer, TRADIC, in running the classical algorithm, their machine would eclipse all of the world's supercomputers in a few years. "Our architecture is feasible to be scaled up to a larger number of photons and with a higher rate to race against increasingly advanced classical computers," they said in the research paper published in Nature Photonics. This device is said to be the first quantum computer beating a real electronic classical computer in practice. Scientists estimate that the current faster supercomputers would struggle to estimate the behavior of 20 photons.
Just curious to read...
Paul B.
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I always struggle with understanding quantum computing concepts, but from the sound of things in the article, this is not some sort of general purpose quantum computer. Rather, it's a purpose-built computer dedicated to estimating the behavior of photons.
Why that specifically?
Based on what the article (and summary) said, modern computers struggle to estimate the behavior of 20 or more photons, but it's the sort of problem that quantum computers are theoretically capable of handling quite easily. Researchers are apparently suggesting that in order to disprove skeptics and bring in more support for quantum computing, we should build a quantum computer of this variety and then use it to estimate the behavior of 30 or more photons, because doing so would definitively prove to everyone that quantum computers can provide a massive advantage over traditional computing methods.
LOL, I see what you did there and it is kind of funny.... BUT, does it compute?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Paper preprint...
Wikipage about boson sampling...
In principle, a large-scale boson-sampling machine would constitute an effective disproof against a foundational tenet in computer science: the Extended Church-Turing Thesis, which postulates that all realistic physical systems can be efficiently simulated with a (classical) probabilistic Turing machine.
The machine may not have any practical use, but it still is an interesting theoretical advance that might serve to challenge our understanding of computablity... Part of the theoretical importance of this area of research is the understanding of #P-complete problems.
The wikipedia articlenotes the theoretical significance of this...
A polynomial-time algorithm for solving a #P-complete problem, if it existed, would imply P = NP, and thus P = PH. No such algorithm is currently known.
I doubt it, but hey, let's take a look and see.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I doubt the headline writer saw what they did there though. A quantum leap is literally the smallest possible change to a system. So the headline suggests they have made the smallest possible improvement which is not very impressive at all.
Babbage and the abacus was the original computer technology.
Vacuum tubes and stepper motors... Now THAT was a classic computer...
RTL, TTL, ECL stuff... That was the golden age....
VLSI CMOS that put a CPU on a chip is "modern" computer technology...
So, Don't feel too old.. Unless you where alive during WW2 working at Bletchley house or some other similar effort of the day.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The Chinese are expending significant resources building conventional supercomputers. Which suggests far more promise for quantum computers than current reality.
https://www.top500.org/lists/2016/11/
And that is true for all the computing leaders at present. We know how to build very effective supercomputers. We think that quantum computers might be great, the promise is there in theory, but you'd be a fool to ditch your conventional HPC systems.
And even if quantum computing becomes "a thing", suspicions abound that they might only be good as a specialized co-processor. Need to factor a crazy large prime number? You send that to the quantum computing module. Need to run a web server, database, render some graphics, parse some text, meat & potatoes stuff? You still want a conventional processor.
Can anyone explain in simple language for stupid people (namely, me) how quantum computing could work? What little I know about particle physics suggest that they can't even detect particles directly (only in "probabilities"), so how can they use them to do computing? I suppose I could follow the links and read the scientific papers, but I struggle even with 'dummies' style books (e.g. Tao of Physics and Dancing Wu Li Masters), so I'm sure the papers would be over my head. (And if anyone has any *readable* books or links, feel free to pass them along.)
So, Don't feel too old.. Unless you where alive during WW2 working at Bletchley house or some other similar effort of the day.
In the future he'll take a "quantum leap" to WW2 Bletchley, where he'll make "incredible breakthroughs" because he already knows the answers, and then kill himself because AC posters are, well, you know, ghey*.
* ghey: Usurping the traditional term GAY to take the homosexual meaning out and leaving in the lame.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
and their memory is swiss cheese. Got it.
is there a different kind of leap when developing a Quantum Computer? I mean, it's right there in the name and all...
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The first rule of quantum computing is that everyone talks about scaling their design up to more qubits, but no one actually does it.
See that "Preview" button?
I've been wondering whether the safety of "post-quantum" crypto functions was threatened more by quantum simulators than quantum computers.
As to "how do you know the output is correct?" well, pick a problem with a verification step that is not NP hard I guess...
Someone had to do it.
I suggest bigger cuts to the Office of Science budget. Why do we need to spend money developing better, faster supercomputers? We can let the Chinese do all the expensive R&D, then we can buy the finished product from them. No problem. It worked for drywall, why not quantum puters?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Of course transistors rely on quantum mechanical behaviour to work themselves, so even a classical computer is in essence a quantum mechanical one.
So their breakthrough is a vanishingly small one?
in the TV show by the same name, all of the jumps were into the past. That would mean that they took steps backward...
The US had best be well in front in Quantum computing. The advantage gained by a foreign power may be too great to overcome if we allow them to get a bit ahead of us.