A Chinese research team has surpassed Google, building a quantum computer that completed a calculation in just over an hour that would take classical computers more than eight years to perform.

In recent years researchers around the Globe have finally reached the ‘quantum advantage’ – the point at which quantum computing can solve a problem that normal computers would need years to solve.

A team from Google first achieved the milestone in 2019 using superconducting qubits to achieve quantum supremacy. The theoretical basis for these achievements depends on sampling the output distributions of random quantum circuits.

The following year a team from China managed to trump their time by using photonic qubits.

The same researcher that beat Google the first time – Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, has out performed Google again.

The problem solved this round was around 100 times more challenging than the one solved by Google’s Sycamore processor in 2019 and the technology used was different.