Google has unveiled a computing chip capable of solving problems in minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to complete.
As well as being extremely fast, the experimental quantum chip, called Willow, can reduce errors exponentially. That’s important because currently, quantum computers exponentially create errors, according to Google.
Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum AI, said: “The more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes.”
A “qubit” is a unit of information in quantum computing, like a “bit” in classic computing. A system is described as becoming “more” quantum the faster it solves problems.
Google says its Willow quantum chip was created in Santa Barbara, in one of only a few facilities in the world built from the ground up for this purpose.
In order to make a chip this advanced, the team behind Willow had to make sure every element was “well-functioning”.
“If any component lags or if two components don’t function well together, it drags down system performance,” said Mr Neven in a blog post.
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The team tested Willow against an existing supercomputer using a test called the “random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark”.
If a quantum computer can’t beat a classical computer in reaching that benchmark, “there is strong reason for scepticism that it can tackle more complex quantum tasks”, according to Mr Neven.
Willow’s “astonishing” performance meant it performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
That’s thousands of billions of years – and longer than the age of the universe.
At the moment, quantum computing is still experimental. In the future, though, it is expected to speed up many processes – from making medicines to nuclear fusion research.
However, it’s feared the technology could allow hackers to be more efficient, too.
Google’s next step, according to Mr Neven, is to find a “first ‘useful, beyond-classical’ computation” – a task that a classical computer couldn’t do that is useful to real life.