A CHINESE QUANTUM COMPUTER DID A TREDECILLION YEARS OF WORK IN 25 MICROSECONDS In May, China’s Jiuzhang 4.0 ran a calculation in 25 microseconds that its team says would take El Capitan, America’s fastest supercomputer, more than 10^42 years. That’s a tredecillion, a 1 followed by 42 zeros. The universe is about 14 billion years old. It’s real, peer reviewed in Nature, but it comes with a big catch. The task, called boson sampling, was designed specifically to be impossible for classical computers. It has no practical use. It proves the machine can do something no supercomputer can, not that it can do anything useful yet. That’s why TODAYS news matters more. A separate team, Beijing startup Nakai Quantum, out of Peking University, says it just finished assembling a completely different kind of machine, 4,096 individual atoms, each one a qubit, packed into a perfectly filled 64×64 grid. Atom machines like this are what the US has been betting on for useful computing. Harvard and QuEra ran algorithms on 48 error-protected qubits using about 280 atoms. Nakai hasn’t released error rates yet, those decide whether 4,096 atoms is a computer or just a big grid. Caltech in the US holds the size record at about 6,100 atoms. $INFQ $IONQ $QNT $QBTS