China's top 10 sci-tech triumphs in 2020
2020 saw Chinese teams visit the world's deepest ocean and bring back samples from the moon. Let's take a look at the country's top 10 sci-tech achievements during the year.
# China achieves quantum computational advantage
China announced its achievement of quantum computational advantage by establishing a quantum computer prototype named "Jiuzhang" on Dec. 4. This is the second time that a quantum computational advantage has been secured in the world, after the first claimed by Google's quantum computer Sycamore in 2019.
The Jiuzhang quantum computer, through which up to 76 photons were detected, was developed by a Chinese research team including renowned quantum physicist Pan Jianwei and the study was published online in Science magazine.
This achievement symbolized China's first milestone on the path to achieving a quantum computational advantage, also referred to as "quantum supremacy," which suggests an overwhelming quantum computational speedup.
Named "Jiuzhang" after an ancient Chinese mathematical text, the new computer outperforms Sycamore in computational speed, environmental suitability and computing power on problems with larger samples.
Jiuzhang's quantum computing system can implement large-scale Gaussian boson sampling — a classical simulation algorithm used to demonstrate quantum computational speedup — 100 trillion times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer and 10 billion times faster than the 53-qubit Sycamore.
Content created in partnership with Science and Technology Daily
