Willow is the second major achievement attained by the company which will exponentially reduce errors as it is intensified by using more qubits.
The quantum computing roadmap reveals the company has only attained milestone two of six, which it attained in 2023.
If there are more errors, then the computation will not be that reliable and give incorrect results, which makes it difficult to boost the technology to practical, large-scale use.
The Quantum AI team of Google has now introduced its new quantum computing chip. This chip is capable of solving a computational problem in just five minutes or even less than that. If the same problem was given to a supercomputer then it will take around 10 septillion years to solve.
On December 9, The Quantum AI lead of Google, Hartmut Neven mentioned in a blog post that the chip is named Willow and it is designed to exponentially correct errors and process some computations at an outstanding speed.
He further mentioned that this outstanding number surpasses known timescales in physics and broadly surpasses the age of the universe. It increases faith in the belief that quantum computing takes place in many parallel universes, supporting the notion that we live in a multiverse, a forecast first made by David Deutsch.
The second major achievement
As per Neven, Willow is the second major achievement attained by the company which will exponentially reduce errors as it is intensified by using more qubits. By this, it has also cracked a major challenge in quantum error correction that experts have been trying to do for the past 30 years.
He further mentioned that by using the latest developments in the field of quantum error correction, we are capable of cutting the error rate in half. On the other hand, we gained an exponential cut in the error rate.
This historical achievement is referred to as “below threshold” being capable of driving errors down at the time of boosting the number of qubits. A qubit or quantum bit is a basic unit of data, and the key to quantum computing is that the more you have, the higher the computational power is gained.
Google’s CEO post
Adding more to this, the more qubits there are the more risk of errors there is. If there are more errors, then the computation will not be that reliable and give incorrect results, which makes it difficult to boost the technology to practical, large-scale use.
The chief executive officer of Google, Sundar Pichai mentioned in an X post on December 9 that Willow is a very significant step in the journey of the tech giant to make a useful quantum computer having practical use in drug discovery, fusion energy as well as battery design.
Google desires to make a computer one day that is capable of doing complex, error-corrected computations. The quantum computing roadmap reveals the company has only attained milestone two of six, which it attained in 2023.