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. Contrary to Google’s first demonstration of a quantum advantage, performed last year, their version is virtually unassailable by any classical computer. The results appeared in Science on 3 December1.
“We have shown that we can use photons, the fundamental unit of light, to demonstrate quantum computational power well beyond the classical counterpart,” says Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. He 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.
Read the rest in Nature News: Physicists in China challenge Google’s ‘quantum advantage’.
Machine learning? Hmmm! With that kind of processing power, I can't help but be reminded of Russian President Vladimir Putin's statement:
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Potentially, it could even go beyond the control of any country. I have been watching the old Twilight Zone episodes on Netflix with @cmp2020, and even back then they explored the theme of AI supremacy in a few episodes. Personally, the argument that got my attention was the Bill Joy essay some time around the turn of the century, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. I think it's all on autopilot, though. Guess there's not much to be done except to just hope for the best...
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