Google’s Willow quantum chip is capable of correcting large-scale errors at exponential speeds and may have proven the existence of parallel universes.
Google has announced that its next-generation quantum chip, Willow, has passed two major computing milestones.
Not only is it now capable of exponential error correction, meaning its computing power becomes more reliable the more qubits are used (which has been a challenge for researchers in this field for almost 30 years), but It has also completed a benchmark so challenging that the world’s fastest supercomputer would take 10 septillion years.
For those at home, that’s 10 to the power of 25, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
Willow completed that challenge, the Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) benchmark, in just five minutes.
Quantum computers are expected to be fast, but what’s really impressive is the error correction. Qubits (the building blocks of quantum computing) work so fast and exchange information so quickly that errors can be relatively common. Traditionally, this has meant that adding more qubits to a system has a nasty habit of making calculations more error-prone, dragging systems down to the level of classical computers.
Google’s Willow, however, is quite the opposite.
“Today in Nature we published results showing that the more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors and the more quantum the system becomes,” Hartmut Neven, founder and leader of Google Quantum AI, said in a blog post. week.
“We tested larger and larger arrays of physical qubits, scaling up from a grid of 3×3 coded qubits to a 5×5 grid to a 7×7 grid, and each time, using our latest advances in quantum error correction, we were able to reduce the error rate. in half. In other words, we achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate.
“This landmark achievement is known in the field as ‘subthreshold’: being able to reduce errors while increasing the number of qubits. “You have to prove that you are below the threshold to show real progress in error correction, and this has been an exceptional challenge since Peter Shor introduced quantum error correction in 1995.”
As for random sampling of circuits, the benchmark has no real-world application, but as the hardest thing you can ask of a quantum computer, it is useful to measure the capacity of a quantum system.
Dr Muhammed Esgin, Department of Software Systems and Cybersecurity at Monash University’s School of Information Technology, called the development “good news for the science and development of large-scale quantum computers”, but said it is not yet a threat to cybersecurity standards.
“It is well known in the research community that large-scale quantum computers can render current traditional encryption and cybersecurity mechanisms useless. “These mechanisms are embedded in every corner of our digitalized world, from social media to protecting critical infrastructure,” said Dr. Esgin.
“The good news for now is that not even Google’s Willow quantum computer is powerful enough to threaten today’s traditional cybersecurity protections… yet.”
But according to Neven, the speed with which Willow completed the benchmark may have other implications.
“Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: it performed a calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 minutes.”25 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it down, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years,” Neven said.
“This mind-boggling number exceeds known time scales in physics and far exceeds the age of the universe. “It lends credence to the idea that quantum computing occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”
So there you have it: not only could we be on the eve of a quantum revolution, but somewhere there is a version of me who is a millionaire playboy philanthropist who is drinking a martini right now.
I think I’m jealous…
UPDATE 11/12/24 to add comments from Monash.
