When asked to create a sorting algorithm, AlphaDev came up with one that was 70 per cent faster than the best for lists of five pieces of data and 1.7 per cent faster for lists of over 250,000 items.

A quantum algorithm, however, runs on a quantum computer, which uses quantum bits (or qubits). Unlike bits, qubits can represent 0 and 1 at the same time, due to a property called superposition.