Quantum Computer Breaks Google’s Record

Quantum computing company Quantinuum recently announced a quantum computer that it says outperforms Google’s historic computer by a factor of 100.

Google’s 2019 result used a specific test called the linear cross-entropy criterion in an attempt to prove Quantitative superiorityThe point at which quantum computers outperform advanced conventional (or classical) computers.

What exactly? He is Quantum computer?

Quantum computers run on quantum bits. Quantum bits are like regular bits in computers, except that they can be 0 and 1 at the same time. Because of this quantum property, computers can think of more solutions to a problem faster than a classical computer. Ultimately, quantum computers should be able to solve problems that classical computers cannot.

But quantum computers don’t look like regular computers. That’s because their qubits are usually supercooled atoms, arranged in an array. When cooled to this temperature, the atoms enter a quantum state. The moment the value of any of the qubits becomes certain, the quantum state loses its coherence and the quantum process collapses. For this reason, quantum computers as they exist today are only found in dedicated research and laboratory environments.

What did the quantum computer Quantinuum do?

Quantum computer outperforms Important achievement in 2019 Using Google’s Sycamore processor, it took about 200 seconds to perform a task that would take a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer about 10,000 years to complete.

To achieve this result, the Quantinuum team upgraded the H2-1 processor from a 32-qubit system to a 56-qubit system, significantly increasing its computing power. According to a statement from Quantinuum, its quantum computer also ran its algorithm with about 30,000 times less power than it would have taken a classical computer to run the process.

Importantly, the Quantinuum computer set a new record for the cross-entropy benchmark, a metric used to compare the performance of different quantum computers. The benchmark measures the strength of a quantum system; the noisier the system, the worse your results (closer to zero than to 1). Google’s 2019 cross-entropy score was ~.002; the H2-1 score was ~.35. “In contrast to previous announcements related to the XEB experiments, 35% is a significant step toward the ideal 100% accuracy limit where the computational advantage of quantum computers is clearly on the horizon,” said one Quantinuum member. launch. the team research It is currently hosted on the arXiv preprint server.

What else do quantum computers do?

Quantum computers are testbeds for the future of information—the way people store and transmit data, as well as compute new information. Last year, a different team of researchers showed how quantum computers could perform calculations in a way that’s a lot like time travel.

“The experiment we describe seems impossible to solve using standard (not quantum) physics, which follows the natural arrow of time,” David Arvidsson-Schucor, a quantum physicist at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, told Gizmodo at the time. “So it looks as if quantum entanglement could generate states that actually look like time travel.”

The previous year, another team claimed to have created a quantum wormhole — a portal through which quantum information can travel instantaneously.

Quantinuum was also (unwittingly) making news. In 2022, a team using a Quantinuum computer managed to create a new phase of matter by blasting quantum bits with a laser to read the Fibonacci sequence.

Quantum computing can sometimes seem like science fiction, because it seems so strange that we are exploiting a world outside of classical physics to perform complex calculations. But the systems are constantly improving, and their applications are diverse (though some are bordering on dreams). For now, it’s limited to research settings, but quantum computers are slowly creating the world of tomorrow today.