| Bloomberg
A issue that would take supercomputers about ten septillion years to solve can be solved in five minutes by Alphabet Inc.’s quantum computer. The next challenge for Google is to find a practical application for all of that theoretical strength.
In conducting a benchmark computation, Google’s computer with the new Willow quantum chip trounced the Frontier supercomputer in minutes, completing the task that would have taken the latter 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years—much longer than the universe’s lifetime. That is a significant improvement over Google’s claimed performance five years ago, when it claimed to be able to finish a 10,000-year assignment in a matter of minutes.
According to Hartmut Neven, the inventor of Google Quantum AI, the program, which was created to test the capabilities of the quantum computer, has no known practical uses, but that is irrelevant.
Neven stated in an interview that you won’t win on a useful problem either if you can’t win at least on one. According to him, Google plans to present a real-world use case next year that is impossible for a traditional computer to address. We’re coming close to that now.
The prospect of commercial and military dominance resulting from computing rates millions of times faster than those of classical computers has enticed governments, some of the largest IT corporations in the world, and venture capitalists to invest billions of dollars in quantum computers.
The majority of experiments assume temperatures close to absolute zero, but because quantum computers employ the behavior of subatomic particles, they must function in conditions that stop the particles from interacting with their surroundings. Since high error rates made it challenging to perform quantum computing at scale, these restrictions have made it challenging to identify useful and real-world applications for the technology.
According to a study released Monday in the scientific journal Nature, the Willow chip reduces error rates. As a result, a larger quantum computer can be constructed, and Google can now start estimating prices, Neven said.
Different approaches are competing for supremacy in the field of quantum computing. The Willow chips are manufactured using techniques akin to those used to create traditional microchips, and Google’s technology, known as superconducting qubits, is also utilized by competitors International Business Machines Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. However, QuEra Computing Inc., which employs what are known as neutral atom qubits, was also recently acquired by Google. In quantum computing, a qubit is the fundamental information unit.
We want to be absolutely certain that we scale up the most promising technology when we decide to finally pull the trigger. “We are confident that these would be superconducting qubits,” Neven stated. Perhaps, however, QuEra shows us that neutral atoms have benefits. We shall see.
Bloomberg L.P., 2024.
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