April 14, 2021

Pablo Bonilla, a 21-year-old student at the University of Sydney, has done an excellent job solving one of the most common problems in quantum computing. The second-year physics student, who received a coding exercise as an additional homework, returned with a code that will help solve problems in quantum computing. While his code generated a lot of interest especially among researchers at Yale and Duke University in the United States, a technology giant, Amazon will use it in the quantum computer it is trying to build for its cloud platform Amazon Web Services.

For many, quantum computing technology is considered the future of computer technology, and is currently being developed at the microscopic level with the help of theoretical physics. Ben Brown of the University of Sydney, co-author of the paper, observed that the brilliance of Pablo Bonilla’s code lies in its simplicity. “It’s wild, it’s such a small change but I really like the simple ideas, I think they’re the best. We just made the smallest of changes to a chip that everybody is building, and all of a sudden it started doing a lot better. It’s quite amazing to me that nobody spotted it in the 20-or-so years that people have been working on that model.”

For more information, read the original story in ABC