Researchers at Google reached a major milestone in the race to build practical quantum computers, revealing a device with an error rate that gets lower as the number of qubits increases. The company says the breakthrough could allow it to build a commercially viable quantum computer by the end of the decade.
Quantum computers rely on individual qubits, which harness the power of quantum mechanics but are highly susceptible to things like temperature fluctuations, potentially introducing errors. Google’s Willow chip effectively spreads the quantum information across more than 100 qubits—making one, single “logical” qubit. See a deep dive here (w/video).
To demonstrate, researchers performed a benchmark calculation using Willow in about five minutes. In contrast, a supercomputer would take 714 trillion times longer than the age of the universe, which is about 14 billion years old, to perform the same computation. Researchers will now work to scale up multiple logical qubits connected together.
Learn about the basics of quantum computing and see the best resources on the topic from across the internet.