A team of researchers from Xanadu in Canada and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, in the U.S., is claiming that their quantum computer, Borealis, has achieved computational advantage in taking on the boson sampling challenge. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their computer and how well it performed when tackling the challenge. Daniel Jost Brod, with the Federal Fluminense University, in Brazil, has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining the short history of quantum computing and the work done by the team on this new effort.

As work continues toward a truly usable machine, research groups add more power to the devices they are working on and then subject them to computational advantage tests. Such tests are meant to show that a given device is able to process a problem that would take conventional computers so long to run that doing so would be impractical.

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