Google’s Quantum Computing Milestone: The Willow Chip
Google has recently unveiled a groundbreaking quantum computing chip named Willow. This marks a significant milestone in quantum error correction and computational speed. The chip completed a complex computation in under five minutes, a task that would take today’s fastest supercomputers approximately 10 septillion years to solve.
The Willow chip, featuring 105 qubits in a superconducting grid design, successfully demonstrated below-threshold quantum error correction for the first time. This implies that as the system adds more qubits, the error rate decreases exponentially. This is a crucial requirement for building large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers.
While quantum computing still has limited real-world applications today, experts believe Willow represents a major step toward commercially viable quantum systems. These could revolutionize fields including:
- Drug discovery
- Material science
- Cryptography
- Artificial intelligence
These advancements are expected to occur within the next decade.
Source: CNBC