QUANTUM COMPUTING
16 Dec 2024
Willow, Googles latest quantum chip has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.
The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.
Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years which is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years (that is, 1025) a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.
The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. When Hartmut Neven founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society's greatest challenges. As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications.
As a measure of Willow’s performance, we used the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark. Pioneered by our team and now widely used as a standard in the field, RCS is the classically hardest benchmark that can be done on a quantum computer today. You can think of this as an entry point for quantum computing — it checks whether a quantum computer is doing something that couldn’t be done on a classical computer. Any team building a quantum computer should check first if it can beat classical computers on RCS; otherwise there is strong reason for skepticism that it can tackle more complex quantum tasks. We’ve consistently used this benchmark to assess progress from one generation of chip to the next — we reported Sycamore results in October 2019 and again recently in October 2024.
Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing:
It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years.
If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years.
If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
Source & Credit
Hartmut Neven - Founder & Lead - Google AI
https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/
#QuantumComputing #Google #Willow #GoogleWillow
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