JP Morgan Chase and Quantinuum approach quantum advantage

Quantinuum has upped the qubit count on its flagship H2-1 quantum computer and, following tests with its industry partner JP Morgan Chase, has delivered results that it claims would be impossible for a classical computer to simulate.

The vendor, a commercially-driven merger of Cambridge Quantum and Honeywell Quantum Solutions, made its quantum supremacy claim in a press release and blog following the upgrade of its H2-1 model from 32 to 56 qubits.

Quantum bits, or qubits, are the basic unit of information in quantum computers.

In a mission to demonstrate that a programmable quantum computer can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time, the manufacturer enlisted the help of long-term collaborator, the multinational finance company JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The team ran a Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) algorithm that it claimed achieved “100 x improvement” over previous results delivered by Google in 2019.

Quantinuum claimed that the H2 has also set a new world record for the ‘cross entropy benchmark’, a measure of how error-free (or ‘noise-free’) a computer is.

Qubits are highly sensitive to the environment, making error correction the biggest obstacle to quantum computing.  The closer the benchmark is to 1, the closer a computer is to an ideal ‘noiseless’ quantum computer.

Quantinuum claimed that its cross-entropy benchmark score was 0.35 which is over 100 times better than Google’s record score of 0.00224 set in 2019.

Until now, classical computers could fully simulate quantum computers, meaning they could solve the answers to any problem that a quantum computer could solve.

Following this demonstration. Quantinuum concluded that its 56-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer could not be simulated by a classical computer.

Explaining the significance of this “key milestone” for the finance industry, Marco Pistoia, head of Global Technology Applied Research at JPMorgan Chase, said: “The fidelity achieved in our random circuit sampling experiment shows unprecedented system-level performance of the Quantinuum quantum computer.

“We are excited to leverage this high fidelity to advance the field of quantum algorithms for industrial use cases broadly, and financial use cases.”

Rajeeb Hazra, CEO of Quantinuum added that the firm’s focus on the quality of qubits rather than the quality was “changing what is possible”. He added: “It’s also bringing us closer to the long-awaited commercialization of quantum’s applications across industries like finance, logistics, transportation and chemistry.”

Quantinuum is also exploring quantum computing uses with the BBC,  University College London and HSBC.