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 announced that its cutting-edge quantum chip, Willow, has reached two important computing milestones.
Not only is it now able to correct errors exponentially, meaning its computing power becomes more reliable the more qubits are used – something that has been a challenge for researchers in the field for almost 30 years – but he also carried out a test so demanding that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10 seven billion 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 this challenge, the Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) test, in just five minutes.
Quantum computers are expected to be fast, but it’s the error correction that’s truly impressive. Qubits – the building blocks of quantum computing – operate so quickly and exchange information so quickly that errors can be relatively common. Traditionally, this meant that adding more qubits into a system had the bad habit of making calculations more error-prone, bringing 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,” said Hartmut Neven, founder and head of Google Quantum AI, in a blog post. week.
“We tested ever-larger arrays of physical qubits, moving from a grid of 3×3 encoded qubits to a 5×5 grid, then to a 7×7 grid – and each time, thanks to our latest advances in qubit correction. ‘quantum errors, we were able to reduce the error rate by half. In other words, we achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate.
“This landmark achievement is known in the field as being ‘below the threshold’: being able to reduce errors while increasing the number of qubits. You have to demonstrate that you are below the threshold to show real progress in error correction, and this has been an exceptional challenge since quantum error correction was introduced by Peter Shor in 1995.”
As for sampling random circuits, the benchmark has no real-world applications, but as the hardest thing you can ask of a quantum computer, it is useful to measure the ability to a quantum system.
Dr Muhammed Esgin, from the Department of Software Systems and Cybersecurity in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, called the development “good news for science and the development of large-scale quantum computers ”, but said it was 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 aspect of our digitized world, from social media to securing critical infrastructure,” said Dr. Esgin.
“The good news for now is that even Google’s Willow quantum computer is not yet powerful enough to threaten today’s traditional cybersecurity protections.”
But, according to Neven, the speed with which Willow completed the benchmark could have other implications.
“Willow’s performance on this test is astonishing: it completed a calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it down, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years ago,” Neven said.
“This staggering number exceeds the time scales known in physics and far exceeds the age of the universe. This lends credence to the idea that quantum computing occurs in many parallel universes, consistent with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
Lo and behold, not only might we be on the cusp of a quantum revolution, but somewhere there exists a version of me who is a millionaire philanthropist playboy sipping a martini right now.
I think I’m jealous…
UDPATE 12/11/24 to add Monash’s comment.
