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Google unveiled a new quantum chip that has racked up some mic-dropping achievements.
The chip, which goes by Willow, was introduced in a research paper published on Nature and a blog post by Google Quantum AI lead and founder Hartmut Neven earlier this week. In the post, Neven touted some of Willow’s accomplishments, including how the chip cracked a “key challenge” in quantum error correction, techniques used to shield quantum information from errors. Willow is capable of reducing errors “exponentially” as the amount of qubits, a basic unit of information in quantum computing, increases (usually, more qubits equals more errors).
If that’s not impressive, Willow also completed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes. For comparison, today’s fastest supercomputer is able to complete the same computation in 10 septillion years (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years!).
“As the first system below threshold, this is the most convincing prototype for a scalable logical qubit built to date,” Neven wrote in a blog post. “It’s a strong sign that useful, very large quantum computers can indeed be built.”
Eureka! Willow’s debut is the talk of the town in the quantum world. California-based quantum computing company PsiQuantum co-founder Pete Shadbolt told IT Brew that the tech giant’s recent feat is a “very impressive piece of work.”
“Quantum computing is a field with lots of hype and lots of breakthroughs and so on, but also lots of skeptics and the skeptics had worried, understandably, that this error correction demonstration might be either practically too difficult or even actually impossible,” Shadbolt said. “And so it’s really exciting that they’ve shown that it works in just the way that it was supposed to.”
Xuedong Hu, a physics professor and department chair at University at Buffalo, added that Willow is a “big step forward” for the industry, but noted that it is one of many steps that need to be completed to get closer to a “universal” quantum computer.
“There’s no question they made huge progress there, but I think there’s also still a long road ahead of them, or IBM, or any company,” Hu said. “They can do a lot of things now with a few qubits [and] with a few 10s of qubit…I don’t think anybody has [been] shown with a field of these noisy physical qubits [doing] anything that a classical computer can do.”
What comes next? According to Neven, it’s only up from here for innovation in the quantum industry following Willow’s big debut.
“The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first ‘useful, beyond-classical’ computation on today’s quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application,” Neven wrote. “We’re optimistic that the Willow generation of chips can help us achieve this goal.”