Google announced on Monday that it solved a major quantum computing difficulty with a new generation of chips, completing a computation in five minutes that would take a traditional computer longer time than the universe has existed.
The findings, which were made public on Monday, were derived from a new chip named Willow that contains 105 “qubits,” the fundamental units of quantum computers. Since they can be jostled by even the smallest subatomic particle from events in outer space, qubits are quick yet prone to errors.
Because quantum computers are “noisy,” every one in 1,000 qubits—the basic building elements of a quan computer—fail in the absence of error-correction methods.”
These inaccuracies can accumulate to the point where a semiconductor is no more advanced than a standard computer chip as more qubits are crammed into it. Therefore, researchers have been working on quantum error correction since the 1990s.
One of the main obstacles to scaling up these devices to a level where they can outperform the fastest supercomputers is their high mistake rate. For this reason, research has focused on creating quantum computers with better and less prone to errors rather than just more qubits.
According to Google, its new quantum processing unit (QPU), named “Willow,” is the first in the world to produce results that are “below threshold”—a milestone described in a 1995 research paper by computer scientist Peter Shor. In a research, the group described the technology. In a research that was published in the journal Nature on December 9, the scientists described the technology. With the achievement of this “below threshold” milestone, a quantum computer’s errors will decrease exponentially with the number of physical qubits added. It lays out a plan for future quantum machine scaling.
With the achievement of this “below threshold” milestone, a quantum computer’s errors will decrease exponentially with the number of physical qubits added. It lays out a plan for future quantum machine scaling.
The system is based on logical qubits. This qubit was encoded using a lattice-shaped collection of physical qubits. When a single logical qubit’s physical qubits all share the same data, calculations can still proceed even if one of the qubits fails because the information is still contained in the logical qubit.
“What we’ve been able to do in quantum error correction is a really important milestone — for the scientific community and for the future of quantum computing — which is [to] show that we can make a system that operates below the quantum error correction threshold,” Julian Kelly, Google Quantum AI’s director of quantum hardware, told Live Science.
Mind-boggling results for quantum computing
Additionally, the Willow QPU’s initial edition can reach a coherence time of about 100 microseconds, which is five times faster than Google’s previous Sycamore chip’s performance.
When scientists used the chip to solve a task that would have taken a traditional supercomputer 10,000 years to calculate, Google first declared that Sycamore had passed the RCS benchmark in 2019. That record was surpassed by a factor of 100 in July by a new quantum computer developed by Quantinum.
Google stated in a blog post on Monday that it considered some of these concerns when creating its most recent projections. Google said that even in the best-case scenario, a traditional computer would still require a billion years to achieve the same results as its most recent chip.
Google is devoted to producing the most reliable qubits, even though some of its manufacture processors with more qubits than Google. In an interview, Google Quantum AI chief architect Anthony Megrant stated.
