Chinese team’s classical computing tackles the ‘impossible’ to challenge Google’s ‘quantum supremacy’
- Chinese Academy of Sciences team says it has developed an algorithm to perform a task ‘thought to be impossible for classical computations’
- Researchers say the 1 million uncorrelated samples from their method have a greater fidelity than that of the Google quantum computer
The Chinese team said their non-quantum classical computer completed the sampling task “in about 15 hours” with higher estimated fidelity – or accuracy – than Google’s quantum computer Sycamore, which took 200 seconds for the same task.
The team said the 1 million uncorrelated samples generated using their method had a fidelity of 0.0037, compared to that of the Google quantum computer’s 0.002.
In a paper to be submitted to a scientific journal for peer review, scientists at the Institute of Theoretical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said their algorithm on classical computers completed the simulation for the Sycamore quantum circuits “in about 15 hours using 512 graphics processing units (GPUs)”.
“We propose a new method to classically solve this problem by contracting the corresponding tensor network just once, [it] is massively more efficient than existing methods in obtaining a large number of uncorrelated samples with a target fidelity,” they said.
