Does China’s Jiuzhang 4.0 computer herald the age of quantum supremacy?

China’s new programmable photonic quantum computing prototype, Jiuzhang 4.0, completed a complex calculation in microseconds Jiuzhang 4.0 completed a Gaussian boson sampling task in just 25 microseconds – a calculation they estimated would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan in the United States, a mind-boggling more than 10^42 years to finish, according to the university in the eastern city of Hefei. A Gaussian boson sampling task is a quantum computing task that is computationally difficult for classical computers to handle. “No realistic classical computing resources, to our knowledge, can bring the MPS [matrix product state] algorithm anywhere near the accuracy achieved by our experiment,” the team said in a press release. Jiuzhang 4.0 operates with 1,024 squeezed-state inputs across an 8,176-mode interferometric network, and can manipulate and detect up to 3,050 photons – more than 10 times the scale achieved in previous experiments.

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