Quantinuum claims quantum computing breakthrough. Commercial applications are on the way, says CEO.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Quantinuum said it had achieved a milestone for the quantum computing sector after its system completed a number-generation task outside the reach of traditional computers, just weeks after D-Wave Quantum made similar claims of quantum supremacy.

Quantinuum, JPMorgan Chase, and other collaborators including two federally-backed research labs said Wednesday that they had demonstrated a potential real-world application of a quantum computer. In a paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers claimed they were the first to prove mathematically that they produced “genuine randomness." They noted that the generation of random numbers could be used in cryptography and cracking complex mathematical problems.

To achieve so-called “certified randomness," cybersecurity experts at JPMorgan Chase wrote an algorithm for a quantum machine to generate random numbers, which they then ran on a Quantinuum computer. The researchers used the 56-qubit Quantinuum System Model H2, which was found in an earlier study to have one of the most powerful quantum processing units on the market.

The team also used classical supercomputers to test whether the output was truly random, including a familiar one: Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Frontier, the same machine used in D-Wave’s study earlier this month. The researchers relied on an approach called random circuit sampling to perform a certified-randomness-expansion protocol, which outputs more randomness than was input—something unachievable by classical computers.