China achieves quantum computational advantage

[Music] a chinese research team announced to have achieved a significant quantum computational advantage but what is it about and how will this milestone potentially change our lives and we'll also explore the wider political implications of the right of quantum computing and the race to be at the top welcome to a special edition of the point with me luchine i'll be talking exclusively to the very scientists behind this project [Music] on december the third a chinese research team claimed to have achieved the first milestone on the path to what's known as quantum supremacy the team which includes renounced quantum physicist panjim wei announced that their quantum computer prototype completed in a couple of minutes a task they would test that would take the world's fastest super computer 2.5 billion years but what's the significance of such a breakthrough how should how could the team make it and what does it mean for china other countries and potentially for you joining me by phone today are two of the key players behind this project professor panjianwei himself he's dubbed china's father of quantum and professor liu chao yang both from the university of science and technology of china also joining us from stockholm sweden is professor val zwiller of the royal institute of technology of sweden and from austria via skype professor anton zeilinger member of the chinese academy of sciences and also the austrian academy of sciences he is also winner of the wolf prize one of the most prestigious international awards in science so gentlemen it's a great pleasure to have you on the show let me go to of course professor pan for um a bit of a background information about exactly what this project is all about including the name of this computer that's called joe jung in chinese so professor pan help us understand exactly what the project is all about and why this name for your computer prototype hello it is my great pleasure to attend under this program so i'm so happy and my former phd supervisor and professor anton zilling and also with us and also professor vasquez francilla is also with us uh so the reason why we call our optical computer as you done is for two reasons so the first one is because june junk and actually is a famous asian chinese book about mathematics so i mean when i was young i studied physics you know i started mathematics so i read this book where you can learn a lot about the geometry and also lien equation but of course unfortunately in that book we do not have too much symbol so all the mathematics are explained by language so i just want to show i mean possible and actually in our own time in china we already have some very important awards in mathematics so because our optical computing can calculate something very fast so that's one of the reason and we give the name of our optic computer feel done so of course and actually we have another meaning about these main chinese it's blonde a very famous collection of ancient poems in china so i mean in that collection of ancient poems we can see a lot of very nice poems so that's another reason why we call it in view down yeah i see good that we have the opportunity and to understand the stories behind just the name of this computer because in a lot of international reporting we just don't get you know what does this strange looking word apparently what does it mean but thank you for the explanation but let me go to your colleague um professor lou there as i mentioned this computer prototype is able to do some super things you know calculating in just a couple of minutes what would take the world's fastest computer 2.5 billion years so professor lou help us understand exactly what that means does it mean that your computer prototype actually already achieved what's known as quantum supremacy so actually i think in our community we have two words to describe you know when a quantum machine can do a specific task that no classical computer can perform the syntax in a reasonable time and it's unlikely to be overturned by classical algorithm improvements so one you know some people call it a quantum computational advantage and some people call it quantum supremacy so in our publication in our paper we prefer to call it content computational advantage because we believe some people thought that the word supremacy is it's not so nice you know it can refer to some other bad meaning so we would like to speak to the world of quantum computational advantage and so the short answer is uh is yes based on the optimal based on the optimal classical algorithm and the state-of-the-art classical supercomputer it appears that you know our quantum machine can can finish the sampling work with them you know which is much much faster than the classical machine well this is a rather technical discussion i understand for a lot of a lot of us it's going to be a little bit difficult to understand so let me go to uh professor feilinger joining us from austria maybe help us understand a little bit the whole idea the significance of such an advantage or or such a milestone for instance some reporting are saying that this computer is able to detect 76 photons more than the average of 43 previously detected what does that mean exactly in terms of science and technological development well the the result is extremely impressive in my eyes because to detect uh so many photons in the exact number i it is not important it's something above 50 or something but the important point is that you have to the the idea of this quantum computer is that you work with photons which is particles of light and to work with many photons so the point is that you look at joint properties of these many photons in some way and that means that your setup has to be firstly able to detect these photons with very high chance you know this is that this is a big advantage in the experiment and secondly you have to manipulate all these particles in a complicated network such they don't lose their their their properties and this is an achievement which is enormous i should mention that uh this kind of basic things were were developed for the for the first time in actually in together with uh my student here vapan in when he was in austria and there we worked with four photons or whatever you know and now it he has so many this is absolutely impressive let me let me give one small remark what is really i'm not so much uh think the time how fast the computer is is very important but what is also very important is that they can achieve results which you cannot even with a classical computer find out that it's correct you know it's so complicated to verify that this is something where a classic computer would have to say oh i don't know if this is correct or not and and that is that is really impressive that is the most important in my eyes this is most important that and leads to a to a very interesting development okay professor zwiller let me turn to you we know that okay this is a very big achievement but this is not the first time that countries or company or institutions try to do this for instance google in october 2019 they also were able to reach a kind of quantum computing milestone and the new prototype by that time was processing 10 billion times faster than oh this is the chinese side the chinese story that you know the chinese prototype is is even faster than what was developed by google so help us understand if you can like by you know comparing what uh professor pan did versus what was done in 2019 what's the difference is there an a new step achieved is there a different way of doing a similar experiments definitely this is really a new step it's a major step i would call it a leap forward i think we're really dealing here with a sputnik moment where a totally new paradigm has been demonstrated what we have what we have here before our eyes is a totally new approach where uh this uh quantum processor that we have now here is based on on light it deals with with photons it processes photons at the single photon level on a large number what has been done previously was based on other technologies which are very hard to scale up so what we have here is a photonic based system that is scalable is already achieving something that is very impressive but it also opening the way for even more advanced and more ambitious calculations and implementations in the near future great um let me go back to professor pan and ask him a question that many people would have on their mind at this moment so it sounds very exciting maybe we don't exactly knows the technical side of it but we all want to know what practical use this new development is going to have and how is it going to affect our lives uh our societies in what way professor pan help us understand this right so uh as i mean just mentioned by professor anton zeiling and professor vasuila and they are explain what is photonic content computing so actually so the traditional computer uh deal with uh bit so bit has two value and zero and one but i mean for a constant computer that means the basic element is cubit so for the qubit and can be either in zero or one but in some kind it can either and it can even in the coherency position of zero and one so that's one of the main reason and why common computing sometimes can do much fast can calculate something much faster than the traditional computer so however as i just mentioned i mean and we can use different kind of qubits to perform content computing such as google dips in last year they are using as you were using um super conducting cubic and we are using an photonic qubit so to do so actually it take us a long way and as anton just mentioned many years ago it's almost 23 years ago we managed to perform three photon or four photon entanglement so at that time i thought it might is the end of the photonic quantum information processing so that's why many years ago i sent my student to yahan to cambridge to learn something about the content board so that we can have many more i mean a single photon state but after i mean some years effort we find out maybe we come back to the parametric bond conversion so we find that parametric bond conversion might still be a good solution to do something meaningful so in 2013 and we decided to go forward along the direction so it really takes a long way to manage to manipulate along the physical manipulation yeah so i think one of the main meaning is not to claim we achieve the quantum computation advantage because in last year after the claiming of google's results there are other groups also questioning and whether it's really sufficient to claim we already achieved content computational advantage so one of the good thing is it sure is also possible to implement something similar with the photonic system so people now will be more convinced so we can really do something useful i mean compared to classic computers yeah that's something i would like to mention yeah okay despite the technicality of all of these answers i think one thing is clear that it has taken a lot of years a lot of efforts and generations of scientists until we're able to come this far professor lou let me ask you what was the biggest obstacle in your development of this technology and how did you overcome it uh actually i think there are a number of uh our tacos which are the biggest if i have to say the biggest i think i would choose that we have to face lock the whole optical setup so we have like you know 50 optical paths each one have a length of 20 meter optical fiber plus 2 meter free space and we have to make sure that the photons go through this optical line they are stabilized seen a precision of about 25 nanometers so i think this is something very challenging to watch professor salinger let me go to you how do you look at the kind of uh scale of the work that's needed to complete such a task we have already seen pictures and for a lot of people they say it's you know it's a it's a magic thing that they're able to build this mid this very complex structure in order to get the kind of position you were talking about how do you look at the sophistication of the technology that seems to be at work here oh this is really a breakthrough in the sense that that you have to send all these many particles of light through many different glass fibers you know the way they are used now to connect houses and you have to combine them in in a very good way very stable way and so on and so on this was before possible for a few particles but to achieve this with so many is is really absolutely mind-boggling and it shows that the part in the future will be very optimistic because i mean clearly a way to go on is to now have all this in microchips you know all this in small chips including the sources and everything and everything yeah and then you can go to much much higher photo numbers and that is quite promising yeah professor zwiller are scientists from around the world able to learn to benefit from the experiment that the chinese scientists have done oh definitely and especially be inspired because what has been said here is a new level of complexity which just seemed totally impossible two or three years ago it's been achieved and it tells us that well yes you can be that ambitious and we can already aim for the next level where already now we have seen that it is possible to manipulate up to 50 single photon states it is possible to operate 100 single photon detectors simultaneously in one experiment so what we can do now is aim even higher and aim for very complex systems based again on quantum optics to solve very challenging problems i think this is a very very exciting that we can now we have this demonstration that photonics is certainly the way to go for for quantum computation and and quantum science in general yes all right many thanks to professor valdsville of the royal institute of technology in sweden and from austria professor anton zeilinger member of the chinese academy of sciences and of the austrian academy of sciences we'll take a short break and when we return we still have the two chinese scientists plus we'll talk about the implications their breakthrough may have on the world stay with us we'll be back right after [Music] making sense of the overwhelming wave of information means cutting through the noise to shine a light on the heart of the story and making room for new perspectives true understanding means the ability to see events from more than one side i'm lucien and this is the point the success of the jio zhang a new light based quantum computer prototype developed by a team including chinese father of quantum professor panjianwei has however led to talks of potential national security concerns for some countries as quantum technology as technologies are able to break encryption keys more easily it has also led to talk of possible quantum hegemony in which china is feared to be able to determine the future of international politics so are those legitimate what did the scientists say still with me by phone are professor panjianwei and professor liu chao young both of the university of science and technology of china and vs guy from the from uk alastair mishi chairman of international board at center for china globalization so gentlemen uh thank you for sticking with us and welcome so um professor pan let me go to you first still now with the jill breakthrough china currently seem to be leading with projects such as launching the first quantum science satellite building a quantum network connecting beijing in shanghai establishing the quantum computer and the building of the world's largest quantum laboratory what does all me what does this all mean for the world from your perspective um i think it's twofold so first of all i mean for example for our current communication network and can provide a high security for future communication and so on but on the other hand the economic communication can also provide us a means and very demanding computational capacity which we need for our future development so we respond to the challenge in the field of quantum information science is not a challenge only for china but also is a challenge for the whole world so with the development of common information science we might can provide a better solution for our future uh information science development yeah but important yeah let me let me ask one specific question specifically how can scientists or the world or other countries benefit from your research are you sharing these results are you uh keeping open your your platform i mean how specifically can your research benefit other countries and and people in other countries right so actually and really fully i mean benefit from development of common information science it will still take quite some time so for example and for quantum computing we need to do three steps three major steps so what we have done is just the first step i mean which by which we can show a means in some specific tasks so quantum computation can do much faster than classical computer but it's part early to claim we can really use such a machine to do something useful so now we will continue to our second step we perform some specially designed quantum simulator or quantum computer to do something really useful to solve some physical problems or some chemistry problems or probably even for mathematics that we are going to do in the next five to ten years then in the long term and probably uh and in the next 15 to 20 years we we want to try to find a possible solution to establish a universal common computer then by then we can really fully explore the advantage of chronic computation so it's still too early to say i mean whether our method can immediately benefit to all the people but definitely i mean our method can inspire the future research in our field alistair alistair let me go to you however humble or however however premature the chinese scientists are saying that their research is to be put into practice practical use already the talk is there right i mean as i said some people are saying oh china is going to claim uh quantum germany there are already u.s official or think tank pointing out potential threat real threat coming from china because of the threat to uh to the safety and security of their communication because quantum technology is supposed to be able to break encryption how do you look at these kind of talks and the political implication of the development we have talked about i think that we should all around the world applaud the enormous commitment of china to advance research in areas like quantum computing but quantum computing is very much in the future uh it's still at a very early stage and i think that the way it's been presented in the media is wrong and it's dangerous because to talk about chinese leadership chinese hegemony and that is a threat to the world this is very dangerous because it's part of the huge challenge that china has in global communication about telling its story there are much much more important areas in computing that should be drawing the headlines and should be doing drawing debate on this kind of program and that is in the area of semiconductors which is absolutely the backbone and the core of computing today and the data is is uh is really extraordinary in that china is importing each year nearly 300 billion us dollars worth of semiconductors because it cannot make them itself what should we be talking about and focused on especially in this uh post-trump era is collaboration understanding communication to understand the differences and the challenges and especially in the area of semiconductors because semiconductors is the absolute backbone of the computing future at the moment and there's a serious imbalance because china cannot make the semiconductors it needs for its manufacturing yeah let me give the last limited limited of uh time to um scientist professor liu chao yang i want to ask you this question and i and and i give you one minute look china is leading here um but is the race to quantum computing or quantum supremacy a sprint or a marathon and how do you how do you get affected do you get affected at all of all of this talk of digital supremacy you know a digital competition between china and the united states or other countries one minute please yes that's first i would like to echo what the other two uh other two guys just said so i want to echo that uh it's still very fundamental uh stage on content computer research and building a quantum computer is not a race between countries but it's just a list between humans and nature and at this stage you know i we would like to emphasize that international collaboration and of open exchange are very important just like we all confront the canola violence and we need to grow closely to solve this problem and the one challenge we face in the field of quantum information today is also for all humans in this planet and not just one single country so i would like to agree with the previous speaker that saying that you know china is leading and you know it's dangerous it's just something you know i think we all all the scientists should be uh collaborate more closely okay thank you so much we have to leave it there such an interesting fascinating discussion but time is of many thanks to professor panjianwei professor with that we come to the end of this special edition of the point with me liu shin as always you can follow me on facebook and twitter using the handle lucien in beijing thanks for watching you've got the point and

Channel: CGTN

Views: 87,853

Keywords: CGTN, News, coronavirus, COVID, quantum, computer, advantage, technology

Id: FsTAF7ppG6s

Length: 28min 33sec (1713 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020