Chinese Scientists Develop Photonic Quantum Analog Computing Chip (sciencemag.org)

hackingbear writes from a report via Xinhua: Chinese scientists demonstrated the first two-dimensional quantum walks of single photons in real spatial space, which may provide a powerful platform to boost analog quantum computing. Scientists at Shanghai Jiaotong University reported in a paper published in the journal Science Advances a three-dimensional photonic chip with a scale up to 49x49 nodes, by using a technique called femtosecond direct writing. Universal quantum computers, under develop by IBM, Google, Alibaba and other American and Chinese rivals, are far from being feasible before error correction and full connections between the increasing numbers of qubits could be realized. In contrast, analog quantum computers, or quantum simulators, can be built in a straightforward way to solve practical problems directly without error correction, and potentially be able to beat the computational power of classical computers in the near future.

Comments

Today's buzzword trifecta winner

[Photonmaker]

Photonic because everything is better when done with lasers, right? Does you i7 make "pew pew" sounds?

Quantum Not so bad, but add it to computing and the number of people who get it is drastically reduced

Analog computing Because two states are never enough, we need 42