THOR AI solves a 100-year-old physics problem in seconds - Science Daily

Diligent sleuthing by astronomers has broken open a cold case in the data archive of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In a study published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers report uncovering a surprising chemical clue that indicates the white dwarf star HS 0209+0832 may host a second-generation planet. A white dwarf is the remnant core of a low-mass star that has burned through all its nuclear fuel and lost its outer envelope of gas and dust to space. A second-generation planet is a world that forms around the stellar remnant from its cast-off material.

Some computations are so hardcore that it takes a facility of extraordinary power to even think about running them. These are the supercomputers – massive facilities humming with the corpulence of their GPUs and CPUs, crunching applications that would take a desktop computer hundreds to thousands of years. A commercially accessible quantum computer has just accomplished a feat that suggests this newer technology could one day leave supercomputers in the dust. In just 19 seconds, IBM's Nighthawk r2 processor generated a million samples – a task estimated to take a supercomputer around 110 years. The results of the experiment have been described in a preprint currently available on arXiv. "To our knowledge," write researchers in a paper led by theoretical condensed matter physicist Tigran Sedrakyan of BlueQubit in the US, "this is the first demonstration of quantum advantage for a vanilla random-circuit sampling on a commercially and broadly accessible quantum processor that most non-expert quantum computer users can easily replicate. "Nighthawk r2, IBM's current-gen quantum processor.