Alphabet Inc.'s quantum computer takes just five minutes to unravel an issue that may take supercomputers about 10 septillion years to unravel. Google's next task is to search out an actual use for all this theoretical power.
Google said its computer, using the brand new Willow Quantum chip, beat the Frontier supercomputer when running a benchmark algorithm, aiming for 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years in a matter of minutes – far longer than the age of the universe. That's exponentially faster than Google's reported performance five years ago, when the corporate said it could solve a ten,000-year problem in minutes.
The algorithm designed to check the quantum computer's capabilities has no known useful applications, but that's inappropriate, based on Hartmut Neven, founding father of Google Quantum AI.
“If you can't win on at least one problem, you won't win on a useful problem either,” Neven said in an interview. Next 12 months, Google desires to deliver a real-world use case that a classic computer can't solve, he said. “That is now within reach.”
Governments and a few of the world's largest technology corporations and enterprise capitalists have poured billions of dollars into quantum computers, lured by the promise of economic and military supremacy resulting from computing speeds tens of millions of times faster than classical computers.
However, because quantum computers harness the behavior of subatomic particles, they have to operate in environments that prevent the particles from interacting with their surroundings, with most experiments assuming temperatures near absolute zero. Such limitations have made it difficult to search out practical and real-world applications for the technology, as high error rates made it difficult to perform quantum computing on a big scale.
According to an article published Monday within the journal Nature, the Willow chip reduces the error rate. That makes it possible to construct a bigger quantum computer, and Google is now able to start out weighing up costs, Neven said.
Various methods are vying to beat the quantum computing space. Google's technology known as superconducting qubits and can be utilized by competitors International Business Machines Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. used. The Willow chips are made using tools much like those used to make traditional microchips. But Google also recently invested in QuEra Computing Inc., which uses so-called neutral atom qubits. A qubit is the basic unit of knowledge in quantum computing.
“When we make the decision to pull the trigger on scaling, we want to be absolutely sure that we are scaling the most promising technology. “We assume that these are superconducting qubits,” said Neven. “But perhaps QuEra will teach us that neutral atoms have their advantages. We’ll see.”
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