The founder and leader of Google Quantum AI, Hartmut Neven, says that the company’s newly unveiled Willow chip represents a breakthrough in quantum computing, as he claims it can perform tasks in minutes that would take current supercomputers septillions of years — a feat he says can only be explained by the existence of parallel universes.
In a blog post on Google’s website, Neven wrote, “The performance of the Willow chip was so phenomenally fast that it had to have ‘borrowed’ the computation from parallel universes.” Neven is basing this bold claim on a computational task performed by Willow that, he says, would have taken today’s best supercomputer 10 septillion years to accomplish. Meanwhile, Willow did it in under five minutes.
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“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe,” Neven wrote. The idea that quantum computing would tap into a parallel universe has been around for a while, Neven is suggesting that Willow is lending that theory credence.
Quantum computers function differently than the average computer. Where the average computer relies on a programming language of ones and zeros, quantum computers use qubits, a basic unit of information in quantum computing that can exist in multiple states simultaneously, allowing quantum computers to solve problems at exponentially faster rates than traditional computers.
Critics of Neven’s claims of a quantum computing breakthrough suggest that the task Willow completed isn’t practical and has no real-world application — that it wasn’t really a test of what it can do and more of a test of its speed.
Regardless of the criticism, Google’s stock jumped five points on the news so at least the blog post made investors happy, which, really, is all that truly matters in this world.