China has built the world's first quantum computing machine, which is incredibly 24,000 times faster than any of its international counterparts. The newly developed computer is expected to outperform the processing power of the current supercomputers.

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The quantum computer, created by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China at Hefei in Anhui province, boasts of the ability to perform sophisticated tasks that classical computers cannot perform. For instance, it can predict the complex movement and behavior of subatomic particles, which normal supercomputers could not because of the unpredictable behavior of these photons. In terms of calculation tasks, the Hefei machine is 10 to 100 times faster than the first electronic digital computer ENIAC.

Pan Jianwei, an academecian from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a leading quantum physicist, said that quantum computing exploits the ability of photons to exist in multiple states at any time. This means that it could store more information than just 1 or 0.

Quantum computer's computing power grows exponentially with the number of quantum bits that can be manipulated. The way these particles behave makes quantum computing carry out tasks quickly without using so much energy such as solving large-scale computation problems that are beyond the ability of current classical computers.

Pan said that the core of quantum computing technology is the manipulation of multi-particle entanglement. And this has been the focus of international competition in quantum computing research. In the photonic system, Pan's team claims to have already achieved the first 5, 6, 8, and 10 entangled photons in the world and is leading in terms of developments.

"Our architecture is feasible to be scaled up to a larger number of photos and with a higher rate to race against increasingly advanced classical computers," the researchers said.

The latest development marks the first single photon-based quantum computing machine that goes beyond the early classical computer. It also paves the way for a quantum computer that can beat classical computers.