Physicists in China challenge Google’s ‘quantum advantage’ Photon-based quantum computer does a calculation that ordinary computers might never be able to do.
“This is the first time that quantum advantage has been demonstrated using light or photonics,” says Christian Weedbrook, chief executive of quantum-computing startup Xanadu in Toronto, Canada, which is seeking to build practical quantum computers based on photonics.Walmsley says this claim of quantum advantage is convincing. “Because [the experiment] hews very closely to the original Aaronson–Arkiphov scheme, it is unlikely that a better classical algorithm can be found,” he says.However, Weedbrook points out that as yet, and in contrast to Google’s Sycamore, the Chinese team’s photonic circuit is not programmable, so at this point “it cannot be used for solving practical problems”.But he adds that if the team is able to build an efficient enough programmable chip, several important computational problems could be solved. Among those are predicting how proteins dock to one another and how molecules vibrate, says Lu.Weedbrook notes that photonic quantum computing started later than the other approaches, but it could now “potentially leap-frog the rest”. At any rate, he adds, “It is only a matter of time before quantum computers will leave classical computers in the dust.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03434-7
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