Quantum computers are supposed to have abilities far beyond conventional ones, but verifying that they actually do is surprisingly difficult – because checking their results can itself require computations that become prohibitively difficult for classical machines.
This is the quantum verification problem, and a new experiment has found an ingenious workaround – a game that puts each type of system to the test.
The catch? There's a mathematically proven limit to how well any classical computer can perform.
And when a team led by computer scientists Marcello Benedetti and Harry Buhrman of Quantinuum in the UK ran it on a trapped-ion quantum system, it sailed right past the limit with ease.
And as the test became more difficult, the chasm between the quantum system's performance and the best possible classical performance yawned ever wider, according to their paper published in Nature Communications.
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