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A Quantum Computer Just Solved a Problem Three Million Times Faster than a Classical Computer

posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 08 2021, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the one-year's-work-shrunk-to-7.8-seconds dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A quantum computer just solved a decades-old problem three million times faster than a classical computer:

Scientists from quantum computing company D-Wave have demonstrated that, using a method called quantum annealing, they could simulate some materials up to three million times faster than it would take with corresponding classical methods.

Together with researchers from Google, the scientists set out to measure the speed of simulation in one of D-Wave's quantum annealing processors, and found that performance increased with both simulation size and problem difficulty, to reach a million-fold speedup over what could be achieved with a classical CPU.

The calculation that D-Wave and Google's teams tackled is a real-world problem; in fact, it has already been resolved by the 2016 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Vadim Berezinskii, J. Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless, who studied the behavior of so-called "exotic magnetism", which occurs in quantum magnetic systems.

[...] In contrast, D-Wave's latest experiment resolved a meaningful problem that scientists are interested in independent of quantum computing. The findings have already attracted the attention of scientists around the world.

Journal Reference:
Andrew D. King, Jack Raymond, Trevor Lanting, et al. Scaling advantage over path-integral Monte Carlo in quantum simulation of geometrically frustrated magnets [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-20901-5)

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday March 08 2021, @10:17PM (3 children)

    by Gaaark (41) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 08 2021, @10:17PM (#1121529) Journal

    I'm wondering what kind of punch-card to use with a quantum computer...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08 2021, @11:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08 2021, @11:29PM (#1121548)

    A ballot, specifically one with hanging chads.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:11AM (#1121593)

    One with hanging chads.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 09 2021, @10:12AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 09 2021, @10:12AM (#1121730) Journal

    Obviously a quantum punch card, where you can have superposition between “there is a hole” and “there is no hole”. But you better be a good typist, as you cannot proofread them; looking at them would collapse their state. :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.