Well, they are temporary advantages of the Chinese, since this race has only just begun. Today many large corporations have projects of this type, apart from Google and IBM, Facebook also has, NASA and some others. They are even launching the first Quantum PC for only $ 5,000, although of course still quite limited to 2 Qbits, but this technology is definitely here to stay and that the user has to look for alternative methods to passwords, which are soon no longer useful. https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/a-desktop-quantum-computer-for-just-usd5-000
the user has to look for alternative methods to passwords
Why? Quantum computers only really break “conventional” asymmetric encryption and there are mature “quantum safe” alternatives.
and there’s not even a single computer usable on large scale to crack passwords yet.
The “Scientist Study” website is not run by anyone, it seems. They don’t have an “about us” page and their WHOIS record points to “Contact Privacy Inc. Customer 1244960640” in Toronto, ON, CA.
Here’s a link to the original paper “Strong quantum computational advantage using a superconducting quantum processor” (Wu et al., 2021), according to Google Scholar cited 12 times.
Scott Aaronson went into a little more detail on his blog, which sheds a bit more light on what this update of their earlier papers means:
the Chinese group seeks to render the debate largely moot with a new and better Gaussian BosonSampling experiment, with 144 modes and up to 113 detected photons. They say they were able to measure k-photon correlations for k up to about 19, which if true would constitute a serious obstacle to the classical simulation strategies that people discussed for the previous experiment.
If this experiment can be replicated, it’s a pretty good step in the right direction of actual quantum supremacy. I don’t think we’re even half way to quantum supremacy, yet.
