Google announced Monday that it has overcome a key challenge in quantum computing with a new generation of chips, solving in five minutes a computational problem that would take a classical computer longer than the history of the universe.
Like other technological giants such as Microsoft and IBM, the company Google, a division of the American group Alphabet, is interested in quantum computing because it promises much higher calculation speeds compared to the fastest current systems, reports
Although the mathematical problem solved by the Santa Barbara, California, US-based company’s quantum lab has no commercial applications, Google hopes that quantum computers will one day solve problems in fields such as medicine, battery chemistry and artificial intelligence (AI) that are inaccessible to today’s computers.
The results published on Monday come from a new chip called Willow, which has 105 qubits – the building blocks of quantum computers. These qubits are fast, but prone to errors because they can be affected by something as small as a subatomic particle from events in outer space, according to Reuters.
As more qubits are included in a chip, these errors can accumulate and make the chip no better than a conventional computer chip. Therefore, since the 90s, scientists have been trying to correct quantum errors.
In a paper published Monday in the scientific journal Nature, Google said it had found a way to allocate qubits to the Willow chip while managing to lower error rates as the number of qubits increased.
The company also said it can correct errors in real time, a key step for its quantum machines to become practical.
“We have passed the break-even point,” Hartmut Neven, who heads Google’s Quantum AI unit, said in an interview.
In 2019, IBM disputed Google’s claim that Google’s quantum chip solved a problem that would take a classical computer 10,000 years, saying the problem could be solved in two and a half days using different technical assumptions about a classical system .
In a blog post on Monday, Google said it took some of these concerns into account in its latest estimates. Even under the most idealistic conditions, Google stated that a classic computer would need a billion years to achieve the same results as its newest chip.
Some of Google’s rivals produce chips with more qubits than Google, but Google is focused on producing the most reliable qubits, Anthony Megrant, chief architect at Google Quantum AI, said in an interview.
Google manufactured its previous chips in a shared facility at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but built its own manufacturing facility to produce the Willow chips. Megrant said the new facility will speed up the speed at which Google can manufacture future chips, which are cooled in giant refrigerators called “cryostats” for experiments.
“If we have a good idea, we want someone on the team to be able to … get it into the cleanroom and into one of these cryostats as quickly as possible so we can get a lot of learning cycles,” Megrant said. .
