The race is on to reign supreme in quantum computing
- China, the United States and the European Union are pulling out all the stops to master a technology that will not only transform computers, but also the world as we know it now
China and the United States compete on many fronts, but quantum computing must be among the most exotic. What has the weird world of particle entanglement and superposition to do with the struggle for technological supremacy in the 21st century? A breakthrough announced by a team of researchers at Google has drawn worldwide attention to this question.
It turns out the tiniest realm known to the human mind has enormous implications for national security, commerce, medicine, weapons and basically everything to do with computers and networks. That is because quantum computing has the potential to be faster and more powerful by many orders of magnitude than the greatest supercomputer in existence. No wonder China, the US and the European Union – three of the world’s largest economies – are competing fiercely for this hi-tech holy grail.
Google’s feat consists in building a quantum computer called Sycamore to perform a random sampling calculation in three minutes and 20 seconds. It claimed the same problem would have taken IBM’s Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, about 10,000 years to solve. IBM, however, has disputed the claim, saying that with programming tweaks, Summit could solve the same problem – which involves verifying whether a set of numbers is randomly distributed – in 2.5 days. But that, in its own way, is a tacit acknowledgement of the power of quantum computing. It is much more powerful because each processing unit carries greater information. Sycamore’s processor has 54 superconducting quantum bits, or qubits. China is known to be working on a 50-qubit device. So, has the genius of American private enterprise again triumphed over state planning?
The American government is not content to leave it all to free enterprise. At least two federal initiatives are under way to streamline and coordinate private and public research in quantum computing and other quantum-related projects. One is called the National Quantum Initiative Act, a law passed last year. The other is a White Paper spelling out a national strategy to ensure America maintains supremacy in the technology over rivals, especially China.
Ironically, such state-sponsored efforts sound a lot like China’s, whose 13th five-year plan launched a “megaproject” for quantum communications and computing. State researchers now work with large private internet companies to develop the nascent technology for government, defence, business and industry.
It is too early to guess who will “win”, though victory may not be an appropriate way to judge the development of such a complex technology. But this technological race is likely to transform computing – and our world – as we know it. It may have far greater impact on humanity than military competition.