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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 Lester on Tuesday March 09 2021, @07:16PM (1 child)

    by Lester (6231) on Tuesday March 09 2021, @07:16PM (#1121947) Journal

    I work in the IT world, and once upon a time I coded a lot in different languages. Although I don't code professionally anymore, I like to keep up to date. So I play with new languages, like nim, rust, go, and test programas new etc
    When I first heard about quantum computing, I wanted to know a little more. I have read articles, read wikipedia entries, but I am totally lost, there no way I can understand qbits, quantum computing and all that stuff.
    I have to admit it, I'm getting old.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @08:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @08:17AM (#1122192)

    uhm... it's not your age. the underlying math is different. no matter how good you are on a piano, if you want to learn the violin you start at the beginning.
    you can't rely on your knowledge of classical computing. you first need quantum mechanics and the underlying math.