Student's First Academic Paper Solves Decades-Old Quantum Computing Problem

'Sydney university student Pablo Bonilla, 21, had his first academic paper published overnight and it might just change the shape of computing forever,' writes Australia's national public broadcaster ABC:

As a second-year physics student at the University of Sydney, Mr Bonilla was given some coding exercises as extra homework and what he returned with has helped to solve one of the most common problems in quantum computing. His code spiked the interest of researchers at Yale and Duke in the United States and the multi-billion-dollar tech giant Amazon plans to use it in the quantum computer it is trying to build for its cloud platform Amazon Web Services....

Assistant professor Shruti Puri of Yale's quantum research program said the new code solved a problem that had persisted for 20 years. 'What amazes me about this new code is its sheer elegance,' she said. 'Its remarkable error-correcting properties are coming from a simple modification to a code that has been studied extensively for almost two decades....'

Co-author of the paper, the University of Sydney's Ben Brown, said the brilliance of Pablo Bonilla's code was in its simplicity... '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.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.