It measures only 4 cm square but has almost inconceivable speed.
Google has built a computer chip that takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take some of the world’s fastest conventional computers 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
That’s 10 septillion years, a number that far exceeds the age of our known universe and has the scientists behind the latest breakthrough in quantum computing resorting to a distinctly non-technical term: “mind-blowing.”
The new chip, called Willow and manufactured in the coastal city of Santa Barbara, California, is about the dimensions of an After Eight mint and could boost the creation of new drugs by greatly speeding up the experimental phase of development.
The reports on its performance follow a series of results since 2021 that suggest we are just five years away from quantum computing becoming powerful enough to begin transforming humanity’s abilities to research and develop new materials, from medicines even batteries, said an independent UK expert. Governments around the world are torrential tens of billions of dollars in research.
Significantly, Willow is claimed to be much less error-prone than previous versions and could boost the potential of the already rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence.
Quantum computing, which takes advantage of the discovery that matter can exist in multiple states at once, is expected to have the power to perform much larger calculations than were previously possible, accelerating the creation of nuclear fusion reactors and accelerate the impact of artificial intelligence, in particular. in medical science. For example, it could allow MRI images to be read in detail at the atomic level, unlocking new caches of data about human bodies and diseases for AI to process, Google said.
But there are also fears that, without security barriers, the technology has the power to break even the most sophisticated encryption, undermining computer security.
Google Quantum AI is one of many groups striving to harness the computing power of quantum mechanics, including microsoft, harvard University and quantuma company with links to the UK. A key problem is reducing the fragility of quantum chips, since even microscopic defects in the materials, cosmic rays and ionizing radiation tend to throw them off course.
“Quantum processors are falling apart at a double-exponential rate and will continue to vastly outperform classical computers as we grow,” said Hartmut Neven, the company’s founder, who said the latest test results, published Monday in the Nature magazine, “solves a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for nearly 30 years.”
He said the new chip’s much faster speed than classical computers “gives credence to the notion that quantum computing occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse.”
Simply put, if a quantum computer can be in many different states at once, it can do more things at the same time.
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Dr Peter Leek, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Quantum Institute and founder of Oxford Quantum Circuits, said: “It’s definitely stimulating to say it that way. What it really does is show that quantum computing technology is advancing rapidly. “It’s really working.”
He described Google’s results as a “shining example” of improvements in error correction, but cautioned that the very fast processing results were related to calculations that were “not of much use in the real world.”
“I’m very optimistic,” he said. “I think we’ll see a real acceleration in the next five years and then we’ll be able to say, look, this machine has calculated something interesting that I can explain to someone and how it could be used in the real world.”
When asked about the risks of high-powered quantum computers destroying current encryption systems, Charina Chou, director and COO of Google Quantum AI, said: “Security experts have been working on this and have had “It will take us many years to really figure out what the right standards should be and what post-quantum encryption should look like.”
He added: “We are working with several large companies, as well as academics and startups in this space, from physics, chemistry and materials science, which seems very, very ripe for collaboration.”