Google’s Willow Quantum Chip Hacks Classic Computers With Space Timeline

Google has just unveiled its latest quantum chip, the Willow, which the tech giant says can perform calculations in five minutes that would take the world’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years.FYI, the universe isn’t even 14 billion years old share.

Quantum computers do their calculations in a fundamentally different way classic supercomputers. The team’s research, published in today Natureoutlines the fault suppression and superior system performance in the Willow processor, which the team wrote “if scaled, can realize the operational demands of large-scale fault-tolerant quantum algorithms.”

Quantum devices are notoriously complex. To perform their remarkable calculations, they must be kept in a quantum state, which generally means a laboratory environment at near-absolute zero.

The serious problem, or goal, depending on your framework, is that quantum computers are not yet capable of solving problems beyond the powers of classical computers. This is the true branch of quantum computing; a device that has practical commercial applications that go beyond what would make sense or even be possible on modern mainstream computers.

Unlike ordinary bits of information in a classical computer, which represent the value “0” or “1”, quantum bits (or qubits) can represent both “0” and “1.” This way, a computer can crunch numbers faster than conventional ones devices. If too many errors occur in a quantum system, the operation breaks down.

A major part of Willow’s significance is that the more qubits Willow uses, the fewer errors the system has.

In a press release accompanying the announcement, Hartmut Neven, founder and head of Google Quantum AI, wrote that “we experimented with larger arrays of physical qubits by scaling up a network of 3×3 encoded qubits to a network of 5. ×5, on a 7×7 grid — and each time, using our latest advances in quantum error correction, we were able to cut the error rate in half.”

“That is,” Neven wrote, “we have achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate.”

The error reduction is called “below the threshold” and is a breakthrough for building future quantum computers with even fewer errors. errors that occurred when it worked on the problem. In addition, the qubit arrays were longer-lived than individual physical qubits in the system, indicating that the error correction improves the flexibility of the entire quantum chip.

Willow’s performance on the Random Chain Sampling (RCS) benchmark will rival the Frontier supercomputer, the world’s fastest classical supercomputer. until last month— 10 septillion years, much longer than the life of the universe. To scale that progress. 2019Google’s Sycamore quantum computer took 200 seconds to solve a problem that would take a supercomputer about 10,000 years to solve, a benchmark that allowed Google to announce: quantum supremacy.

In July, quantum computing company Quantinuum announced a 56-qubit system that exceeded The Sycamore processor tested in 2019 on a benchmark called the linear cross-entropy benchmark. Now Google has drawn a new line in the sand. The team used the RCS benchmark, which tests a quantum computer’s ability to beat classical computers at a calculation. Chain random sampling has no useful applications, but is a fundamental hurdle for quantum computers as scientists pursue commercial, classical use cases.

“Even if people on Main Street don’t care, it can still be very interesting,” said John Preskill, director of Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Google. video accompanying news. “I think quantum hardware has now reached a stage where it can advance science. We can study very complex quantum systems in a way we’ve never had access to before.”

“Quantum algorithms have fundamental scaling laws on their side, as we see with RCS,” Neven said for the collection of training data unavailable to machines, for training and optimization of certain learning architectures, and for modeling systems where quantum effects are important”.

The Google team is now approaching the third milestone in its six-step quantum road map to a misdirected quantum computer.Neven believes that commercial applications could be three to five years away. As with the actual value of the qubit, it’s impossible to say for sure, but Willow’s result shows that real progress is being made.