A quantum computer has solved a 9, 000-year problem in 36 microseconds

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https://news.italy-24.com/technology/478223/A-quantum-computer-has-solved-a-9000-year-problem-in-36-microseconds.html

Quantum computing continues to amaze. A new article published in
Nature announces that a quantum computer is _managed to solve an
operation in 36 microseconds_ which would normally have taken 9,000
years.

Success, as can be read in the study published in the prestigious
journal Nature, was achieved thanks to the Borealis programmable
processor created by the Canadian-based startup Xanadu, which made use
of some innovative techniques.

The result was also applauded by the director of Quantum Computing of
Amazon Web Services, according to whom this work opens the door to
“important advances in understanding offered by quantum computations“.

The approach used by Xanadu is diametrically different from the
machines launched a few years ago by Google, which for the first time
marked an overtaking against traditional computers. In fact, everyone
will remember that in September 2019 Google announced that it had
achieved quantum supremacy, among Intel’s general doubts.

Xanadu was able to perform a calculation in 36 microseconds that would
otherwise have taken at least 9,000 years, _working at room
temperature_ (and therefore without the need to be cooled) and with a
programmable photonic processor.

The _problem solved is known as Gaussian Boson sampling_ and can be
calculated by conventional computers up to certain parameters.


The article is in Italian

Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04725-x

A quantum computer attains computational advantage when outperforming
the best classical computers running the best-known algorithms on
well-defined tasks. No photonic machine offering programmability over
all its quantum gates has demonstrated quantum computational
advantage: previous machines1,2 were largely restricted to static gate
sequences. Earlier photonic demonstrations were also vulnerable to
spoofing3, in which classical heuristics produce samples, without
direct simulation, lying closer to the ideal distribution than do
samples from the quantum hardware. Here we report quantum
computational advantage using Borealis, a photonic processor offering
dynamic programmability on all gates implemented. We carry out
Gaussian boson sampling4 (GBS) on 216 squeezed modes entangled with
three-dimensional connectivity5, using a time-multiplexed and
photon-number-resolving architecture. On average, it would take more
than 9,000 years for the best available algorithms and supercomputers
to produce, using exact methods, a single sample from the programmed
distribution, whereas Borealis requires only 36 μs. This runtime
advantage is over 50 million times as extreme as that reported from
earlier photonic machines. Ours constitutes a very large GBS
experiment, registering events with up to 219 photons and a mean
photon number of 125. This work is a critical milestone on the path to
a practical quantum computer, validating key technological features of
photonics as a platform for this goal.