Google announces quantum computing progress: less than five minutes to top supercomputer's 10 to the power of 25 years
On December 9, technology giant Google launched its latest quantum chip 'Willow' on its official blog, claiming it has achieved two major milestones.
Shortly after this announcement, a round of declines began.
Willow can dramatically reduce errors, addressing a key challenge in quantum error correction that has been researched for nearly 30 years. Additionally, Willow completed a 'standard benchmark computation' in less than five minutes.
According to Google, even the fastest supercomputers today would take '10 to the power of 25' years to complete this computation — a number far exceeding the age of the universe (13.7 billion years). That's 10000000000000000000000000 years.
This means Google has made significant progress in five years. In 2019, Google announced that its sub-computing system took only about 200 seconds to solve a problem that would take the fastest supercomputer at the time 10,000 years.
Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum AI, told the media that the new algorithm aims to test the capabilities of quantum computers. Currently, there are no known useful applications, but that is not the focus.
'If you cannot solve one problem, you cannot solve a useful problem either,' Neven said, adding that Google's goal is to launch a real use case next year that traditional computers cannot solve. 'Now this goal is within reach.'
A paper published the same day by the Google team in Nature stated that the Willow chip significantly reduced the error rate. Neven noted that this makes it possible to build larger quantum computers, and Google can now begin to weigh costs.
It should be noted that the area Google is focusing on is 'superconducting qubits', which are also being used by IBM and Amazon. Meanwhile, Google has also invested in QuEra Computing Inc, which uses neutral atom qubits.
Neven stated, 'When one day we decide to scale up, we want to be absolutely certain that we are scaling up the truly most promising technology. We believe it will be superconducting qubits. But QuEra may tell us that neutral atoms have their advantages. We will wait and see.'