A team of Chinese scientists has claimed that it has built the world’s first quantum computing machine. According to them, the machine is 24,000 times faster than its international counterparts and 10-100 times faster than the first electronic computer, ENIAC. While it might not be of any practical use at the moment, it surely shows China’s work in the field of quantum computing.

A team of scientists from Eastern China created the world’s first quantum computing machine. The team claims that the newly developed quantum computer is about 24,000 times faster than its international competitors.

This quantum computer is built by the researchers working at the University of Science and Technology of China, which is located at Hefei in Anhui province. For those who don’t know, quantum computing machines are incredibly faster than the conventional computers. The quantum computers can also predict the complex behavior of subatomic particles.

The researchers believe that quantum computing could excel the processing power of supercomputers. Pan Jianwei, a quantum physicist, and an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that quantum computing makes use of quantum superposition principle for ultra-fast parallel calculation and simulation capabilities.

The Hefei quantum computing machine is 10 to 100 times faster than the first electronic computer, ENIAC. While it might not be of any practical use at the moment, the future prospects of quantum computing look bright.

Compared to the previous proof-of-principle experiments that had small photon number and low sampling rates, the performance of the new machine is better.

“Our architecture is feasible to be scaled up to a larger number of photons and with a higher rate to race against increasingly advanced classical computers,” the researchers said in a study published in the journal Nature Photonics on Tuesday.

It’s the first quantum computing machine based on single photons. This development is interesting to note because, last year, China created the world’s first hack proof quantum satellite.



[fossBytes]

Hack proof?
I thought that was just an urban legend.