Jiuzhang 4.0, a photonic quantum computer built by Pan Jianwei's group at USTC, was among 20 winners of the 2026 World Internet Conference awards at a ceremony on Monday in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province. According to CGTN, there were more than 430 submissions from 43 countries and regions. The machine computes with photons steered through a network of optical parts, and in a Nature paper in May the researchers described 1,024 beams of squeezed light, a circuit with 8,176 modes and up to 3,050 photons in a run, compared with 255 for Jiuzhang 3.0.
The machine performs a task called Gaussian boson sampling, which has no known commercial use and serves as a test of whether a quantum device can outpace ordinary computers. The team says the El Capitan supercomputer would need more than 10 to the 42nd power years to reproduce the result. Such claims have been challenged before: a 2024 study showed earlier results could be simulated on conventional computers, and the team says it aimed the new work at that method.