China claims quantum supremacy with new supercomputer | DW News

chinese scientists have announced their development of the most powerful quantum computer in the world it works 100 trillion times faster than the fastest supercomputers out there president xi jinping has said research and development in quantum science is an urgent matter of national concern and the country has invested heavily in this technology spending billions in recent years it has become a world leader in the field to the untrained eye it may not look like much but this is now the world's most powerful computer twenty years in the making zhu zheng is the brainchild of china's top scientists who are now asserting their dominance in the race for quantum supremacy zhang has shown outstanding quantum computational capability we are planning to use it for quantum chemistry research and graft theory's combinatorics research it comes little more than a year after google unveiled sycamore their own quantum computer google researchers have achieved an incredible breakthrough in quantum computing their machine needed seconds to perform tasks which conventional systems would require thousands of years to do the chinese team say their light based technique is 10 billion times faster than google's it's a remarkable achievement it's a milestone in the development of these intermediate scale quantum computers it is still early days but scientists hope their achievement will lead to the technology unlocking rapid advancements in encryption and pharmaceutical analysis we have demetrius and galactus a scientist with the center for quantum technologies and alex capri of the hinrich foundation both are joining us from singapore demetrius i want to start with you why does this news out of china matter well it matters because a massive a massive scientific breakthrough first of all and being a scientist i have to highlight that and it's the first time or actually the second time to be exact that we have a quantum computer a prototype quantum computer clearly outperforming classical computers first time was last year in the google labs in santa barbara and this is the second time using a very different technology based on photos that a similar experiment has been made now how will the use of this technology impact people's lives demetrius well we are we are talking about a completely different way of computing impossible things to compute classically so although this demonstration has not achieved that it's it's it's a mathematical problem that probably has been solved if you had a classical computer to do that it would take a few millions or hundreds of thousands of years further down the line we hope that quantum computing will allow us to do impossible problems these days in biology in drug design in in financial optimization in root optimization and and in environment as well so at the moment we don't have the computational power to tackle these very important problems that affect society in very different ways including what we're living through drug design these days very interesting i'm going to turn to alex the chinese government has funneled a lot of money into scientific research why is that well look this is part of a much broader uh techno-nationalist um approach to to advancing uh you know chinese interests when it comes to economics national security obviously geopolitics uh and and you know this is a major priority whether we're talking about the made in china 2025 plan uh semiconductors of course is big uh quantum computing is an area obviously they've been putting a lot of money into so this is a very important um aspect of the of the overall trajectory that the that the chinese communist party is striving for demetrius from a scientific perspective is this china's sputnik moment there's been so much news going on i kind of feel as if this quantum development kind of got lost amidst all the coveted stuff and everything but should we be paying more attention to this from a scientific perspective that's a very good question well it's like it is in a sense it is in a sense and now sputnik it's out there it doesn't do much it just blips but it is there again it's not the first time google in the west has done it first and many other scientific labs around the world are working towards the same uh demonstration of an impossible task for cluster computers it will take us time before we go from this blip blip that sputnik was doing to something like video calls by the satellites and if i want to do the analogy to the space race but we are entering um and already there the quantum race in that sense um in many different yep yeah well one thing that i i'm trying to wrap my head around is just how much bigger of a quantum leap this chinese development has been compared to the google one one of the things that i've been reading is that actually the google one wasn't really quite the you know um it didn't count somehow um help us sort of get a sense of just how much more technologically advanced this development has been well i wouldn't say it's more technologically advanced it's different this is based on photons the google one was based on superconducting cubits very different technologies at the moment we don't know the the field is so early stages we don't know which one will really be the final technology that will implement quantum computing um i would put it at equal footing in a sense uh the the billions of years versus 10 000 years in the google that's kind of the the projected thing but on the other hand the the chinese one was not reprogrammable you cannot really adjust it the way it is to run different algorithms except this specific problem so i would say both are really equally equally exciting for the field definitely from the scientific side alex demetrius has walked us through some of the applications of this technology what is the perspective of this from someone like you who studies technonationalism and the competition we're seeing between the us and china and what is techno nationalism well look techno nationalism is essentially when nation states uh ascribe um the the the power and the prowess if you will of their local firms their local champions if you will to national security uh economic stability and strength and social stability as well so we're seeing all three of those in this emerging u.s china technology hybrid cold war um so i think you know i would i would go back to say that that the you know to put the sputnik moment uh in historical context you know the the united states soviet union um i would think that that sputnik moment would be a bit more significant um you know to jump forward now to this announcement uh that we've just had from from the chinese um i think the the reverse of that is going to be a second moon shot which has really been underway right i think the united states now uh and its european allies and other allies are now going to start focusing on greater emphasis on r d um you know greater emphasis on public-private partnerships around making progress with you know all the uh the the you know industries uh that are emerging and foundational for this next this next century um so i think there really is um there's significance in that it will it'll be a catalyst for that but i don't really i wouldn't call this you know a a historic moment in the context of sputnik alex the pentagon through the research arm darpa launched a program to advance quantum computing earlier this year it feels a little bit behind the curve considering the development that we've just seen how would you assess the u.s china sort of technological race that we're seeing alex so so what we will see melissa is we will see more and more r d be shifted under the military industrial complex so stuff that might have been happening at you know r d that might have been taking place exclusively at companies and maybe at universities and specialized institutions you will see more of that being shifted under the military uh sort of tent if you will demetrius angalakis and alex capri thank you so much for joining us you

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Keywords: quantum supremacy, quantum science, quantum computer, china, cybersecurity, quantum threat, Hefei, hefei quantum computer, quantum computer china, chinese quantum computer, quantum computing, china quantum supremacy, quantum mechanics, quantum physics

Id: E5MBAJJU9Hk

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/gaze]

Cool but it's a boson sampler not a universal quantum computer.

[u/DMTwolf]

Definitely a minor security concern for the CCP to be working on qc... but the US/Canada are still ahead... we’ve got 6-10 startups and 4-5 corporations that are competing with each other to create useful qc tools; china is mostly relying on government labs copying our tech lol