Willow can perform a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes, a task that would take some of the world’s top supercomputers 10 septillion years to complete — written out that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 a length of time far longer than the age of our universe.
The chip features 105 qubits and performs five times better than Google’s previous-generation quantum chips.
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Hartmut Neven, founder and lead of Google’s Quantum AI lab, said Willow will eventually be used to ultimately demonstrate the first “useful, beyond-classical” computation to show quantum hardware can be applied to real-world applications.
“The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago,” Neven wrote in a blog post. “When I 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.”
Willow is designed to reduce errors exponentially as quantum processors scale up using more qubits.
The chip effectively cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.
As qubits, the units of computation in quantum computers, rapidly exchange information with their environment which makes it difficult to protect the data needed to complete a computation — with the more qubits used, the likelihood of errors increases.
Willow, however, smashes that challenge, with the Google engineers behind the hardware able to reduce the number of errors the more qubits used in Willow.
Google’s Quantum AI lab scaled up from a grid of 3x3 encoded qubits to 5x5 and ultimately 7x7 — with each jump in scale reducing the error rate in half.
“We achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate,” Neven explained. “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.”
Fabricated in Google’s new facility in Santa Barbara, California, the new Willow chip marks the next generation in quantum computing, with Google looking to finally push the nascent space from scientific wonder to tangible uses.
“Quantum computation will be indispensable for collecting training data that’s inaccessible to classical machines, training and optimising certain learning architectures, and modelling systems where quantum effects are important,” Neven wrote. “This includes helping us discover new medicines, designing more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerating progress in fusion and new energy alternatives.
“Many of these future game-changing applications won’t be feasible on classical computers; they’re waiting to be unlocked with quantum computing.”
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