A giant leap of limited proportions in quantum computing

Chinese researchers have pushed the envelope of possibility with limited near-term effect

What an incredible week in the realm of quantum computing. Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei have performed a quantum computation known as Gaussian Boson Sampling 100 trillion times faster than any supercomputer. Although the magnitude of this achievement cannot be overstated, it doesn’t have many practical applications. 

I asked several friends of EV to help make sense of it, and I thought I’d share key takeaways from these discussions. The note is brief, read on.

“This is an exciting advance in demonstrating the power of quantum computing. However, it is not a demonstration of something useful,” Matthew Day, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, Canada, told me. The researchers have “shown experimentally that a specific type of quantum device can generate statistics that we can never hope to compute on our supercomputers. They did this years before we thought it would be possible.” 

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