Experimental bosonsampling in a photonic circuit
Matthew A. Broome, Alessandro Fedrizzi, Saleh Rahimi-Keshari, Justin Dove, Scott T. Aaronson, Timothy C. Ralph, Andrew G. White · 2013
The extended Church-Turing thesis posits that any computable function can be calculated efficiently by a probabilistic Turing machine. If this thesis held true, the global effort to build quantum computers might ultimately be unnecessary. The thesis would however be strongly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. BosonSampling—the sampling from a distribution of n photons undergoing some linear-optical process—is a recently developed, and experimentally accessible example of such a task [1].