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Google’s Willow quantum chip is capable of large-scale error correction at exponential rates and may have proven the existence of parallel universes.
Google has announced that its state-of-the-art quantum chip, Willow, has passed two significant computing milestones.
Not only is it now capable of exponential error correction, meaning that its computing power becomes more reliable the more qubits are used – which has been a challenge for researchers in the field for nearly 30 years – but it has also completed a benchmark so challenging that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years.
For those at home, that is 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 it’s the error correction that is truly impressive. Qubits – the building blocks of quantum computing – operate so fast and exchange information so quickly that errors can be relatively common. Traditionally, this has meant that adding more qubits into a system has the nasty habit of making computations more error-prone, dragging the 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 lead of Google Quantum AI, said in a blog post this week.
“We tested ever-larger arrays of physical qubits, scaling up from a grid of 3x3 encoded qubits, to a grid of 5x5, to a grid of 7x7 – and each time, using our latest advances in quantum error correction, we were able to cut the error rate in half. In other words, we achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate.
“This historic accomplishment is known in the field as ‘below threshold’ – being able to drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits. You must demonstrate being below threshold to show real progress on error correction, and this has been an outstanding challenge since quantum error correction was introduced by Peter Shor in 1995.”
As to random circuit sampling, the benchmark doesn’t have any real-world applications, but as the most difficult thing you can task a quantum computer to do, it’s useful to measure the capacity of a quantum system.
Dr Muhammed Esgin, Department of Software Systems & Cybersecurity, of Monash University's Faculty of Information Technology, called the development " good news for science and the development of large-scale quantum computers," but said it's not yet a threat to cyber security standards.
“It is well known in the research community that large-scale quantum computers can render today’s traditional encryption and cybersecurity mechanisms useless. These mechanisms are embedded in every part of our digitalised world from social media to securing critical infrastructure," Dr Esgin said.
"The good news for now is that even Google’s Willow quantum computer is not nearly 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 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,” Neven said.
“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.”
So there you have it – not only could we be on the eve of a quantum revolution, but somewhere out there is a version of me who’s a millionaire playboy philanthropist who is sipping on a martini right now.
I think I’m jealous…
UDPATE 11/12/24 to add Monash commentary.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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