Over the past three years, we’ve heard news of quantum computing device success in a row. The developers of these machines often boast that they can quickly perform calculations that would take too long to be impractical for the world’s most powerful supercomputers. But now, a team of scientists has shown that traditional computers can still be faster than these newly developed devices in some ways.
Whereas classical computers only store information as 1’s and 0’s, quantum computers can also use superpositions of these two states. In theory, this ability allows them to quickly complete some calculations that existing supercomputers would need incredibly long to complete. But producing working quantum computers has been more difficult than previously thought, and it seems even harder to scale them up.
While there is a lot of different support research on the speed of quantum processors that makes them clearly superior, a new study says this advantage isn’t actually real.
From China’s Institute of Theoretical Physics, Dr. A few years ago, Pan Zhang and his colleagues created a much more efficient algorithm to solve a problem that Google’s quantum computer Sycamore solved in 200 seconds and that the best computer on Earth said would take 10,000 years to solve. Instead of the cumbersome Schrödinger-Feynman algorithm proposed by Sycamore’s developers, Pan and his colleagues modeled the problem as a three-dimensional mathematical layout and accepted the precision Sycamore achieved, rather than trying to achieve the perfect result.
Pan’s and his colleagues’ computer spent 15 hours solving the problem. While this is much longer than Sycamore’s 3.3-minute solution, it dispels the claim that it will take longer than conventional computers can solve.
Also, the computer on which the program was run was not overly powerful. If this algorithm were run on a powerful modern computer with ExaFLOPS performance, the authors say, the simulation would only take a few dozen seconds, which is faster than Google’s quantum hardware.
Of course, the most important point here is that Sycamore and other quantum processors have not yet turned into real computers and the tasks they can perform are very limited. The most important purpose during their production is to be produced according to a special task, where they can show their superiority by using their strength.
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