OREANDA-NEWS. Chinese specialists have built quantum computer Jiuzhang that operates 10 billion times faster than Google’s prototype, state news agency Xinhua reported. The results of computer tests were published in the journal Science.

Quantum computers differ from ordinary computers, even supercomputers, in their enormous processing power. They use the concepts of quantum mechanics and work not with bits as a unit of information (0 or 1), but with qubits which can be both 0 and 1. Xinhua writes that this is a serious breakthrough for China and the first stage in achieving full-scale quantum computing – the so-called quantum supremacy. Traditional computers cannot do the same calculations in a reasonable amount of time.

The power of the Chinese quantum computer could be useful in research and technology such as graph theory, machine learning and quantum chemistry, Xinhua explained.