Pan Jianwei hope to achieve quantum error correction in 5 years, 10-15 years to build a universal quantum computer

On November 18, the 5th World Sound Expo and 2022 KDDI Global 1024 Developers Festival opened in Hefei Olympic Sports Center. At the opening ceremony, Pan Jianwei, an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences, delivered a keynote speech on "Current Situation and Prospects of Quantum Computing", sharing the development strategy and future prospects of quantum computing in the era of artificial intelligence.

01The superiority of quantum computing emerges

Academician Pan Jianwei said that quantum technology has become China's national strategy, in the country's 14th Five-Year Plan and the 2035 Vision Plan have pointed out to focus on quantum information, artificial intelligence and other major innovation areas, the formation of national laboratories, has implemented a number of major science and technology projects. At present, China has a certain leading position in quantum technology.

Quantum computing plays an important role in promoting the development of the era of artificial intelligence. Pan Jianwei said that in a sense, if there is no quantum mechanics established, there is no hardware foundation for modern information technology. In all aspects of information science, energy science, life science and materials science, the superiority of quantum computing cannot be ignored.

However, in the development of information technology, there are also some major problems that need to be solved. For example, the huge demand for computing power in the era of big data is growing rapidly, and the traditional development model of information technology is severely constrained, which means that the current computing power possessed by human beings is still quite limited.

In this regard, Academician Pan Jianwei said that the development of quantum mechanics has been prepared to solve these major problems. If the establishment of quantum mechanics is the first quantum revolution, then quantum regulation and the application of quantum information is the second quantum revolution. The second quantum revolution realizes from the experimental testing of the basic principles of quantum mechanics to the active manipulation of quantum states, so that the computational power of quantum computing grows exponentially with the number of manipulable quantum bits, which can not only achieve ultra-fast quantum computing power and reveal the laws of complex systems, but also meet the computational power needs of artificial intelligence and big data. For example, if a big data of 3 million is decomposed, it will take about 150,000 years with the current trillion classical computers, but only one second with quantum computers.

Academician Pan Jianwei said, "The concept of quantum computing was proposed in the 1980s, and after nearly 40 years of efforts by scientists, we have only reached the first stage." The goal of the first stage is to achieve coherent manipulation of about 50 particles, such as bosonic sampling combination optimization, and the computing power in this area can exceed that of current supercomputers, and has been successfully completed in the past one or two years. In the future, once it reaches 100 particles, in some specific calculations, it is equivalent to reach one million times the current global computing power combined.

So what are scientists currently doing? Academician Pan Jianwei mentioned that because quantum computing is particularly error-prone, it is necessary to find a means of error-free computing, also known as quantum error correction, to ensure that the errors that occur in computing can be eliminated in the process of computing. Academician Jianwei Pan and his team are engaged in research related to quantum error correction and expect to complete it in 4-5 years.

02Build a universal quantum computer through 10-15 years

Academician Pan Jianwei said, after the successful completion of quantum computing error correction, the next 5-10 years, to manipulate hundreds or even thousands of quantum bits, to build a special quantum computer, for the traditional supercomputer can not solve the physics of great scientific significance, chemical problems, medical problems. Given the superiority of quantum computing, it is almost impossible for traditional supercomputers to surpass by algorithm improvements alone.

In the course of his speech, Academician Pan Jianwei said that the first to claim the superiority of quantum computing is the United States Google, followed by 2021 China's development of "Zuchongzhi II" quantum computing superiority, except in the readout error rate is slightly worse than Google, all other indicators are better than Google. He said that in solving the random route sampling problem, "Zuchongzhi" has 100,000 times more computational advantage than the current optimal classical algorithm.

In addition, for the development trend of quantum computing hardware, academician Pan Jianwei believes that according to Google's plan, by 2029 or 2030, it will be possible to reach 1 million or millions of quantum bits of manipulation. Then it will be possible to crack the large number decomposition at this time. According to Academician Pan, "This field, although still a bit far from us, is coming to us at a very fast pace."

At the end of his speech, Academician Pan concluded, "We hope to realize quantum error correction in the next 5 years, and then to complete the coherent manipulation of hundreds or even thousands of quantum bits to solve some problems inside the design and optimization algorithms of new materials in quantum chemistry. At the same time, we hope to be able to make efforts for 10-15 years to carry out applications related to cryptanalysis and big data analysis."