Inside the First Ring Road of Capital City, Xia Country.
The Head Councillor looked at Fang Xu, his expression grave.
"Academician Fang, did you just say a Quantum Computer supercomputing center?"
It was not that he doubted him, but Xia Country had been researching quantum computers for a long time.
Its laboratories had achieved some impressive results, too.
Jiuzhang, for example.
As a prototype Optical Quantum Computer with 76 qubits, Jiuzhang had earned countless accolades.
With Jiuzhang, Xia Country had even become the second nation in the world to achieve quantum supremacy.
The reality, however, was not nearly so optimistic.
Rather than using conventional superconducting circuits, ion traps, or semiconductor chips, the Jiuzhang quantum computer had taken another route: using photons as qubits and manipulating them to perform calculations.
But this was something of a shortcut.
At least for the time being, Optical Quantum Computers showed no potential to become general-purpose quantum computers.
The reason was simple. Photons had good coherence and long coherence times. These were the advantages of Optical Quantum Computers, and also what made this approach a shortcut.
But why was their coherence so good?
Quite simply, photons interacted extremely weakly with their environment.
This led to another consequence.
Humans, at least at present, found it very difficult to control photons precisely.
That created a rather awkward situation.
It could not perform general-purpose quantum computing.
In other words, it could not be programmed and could only carry out specific types of calculations.
For the classical mathematical algorithm of Gaussian boson sampling, Jiuzhang achieved astonishing computational speeds, but it was of no use whatsoever for other tasks.
Since this was a project Xia Country had invested considerable effort in researching, the Head Councillor naturally understood Jiuzhang's shortcomings, as well as the difficulty of building a general-purpose quantum computer.