Google said Monday it overcomes key challenges in quantum computing with a new generation of chips, solving computing problems in five minutes, which takes more time than the history of the universe.
Like other tech giants like Microsoft and international business machines, Alphabet’s Google is chasing quantum computing because it promises computing much faster than today’s fastest systems. While the company’s Santa Barbara solves math problems, there is no commercial application in the California Quantum Lab, Google hopes quantum computers will one day solve medicine, battery chemistry, and artificial intelligence (AI) that today’s computers cannot reach. ) issues.
The results released on Monday came from a new chip called Willow that has 105 “Qubits” that are the basis for quantum computers. Qubits are fast but error-prone because they can be entangled with things as small as subatomic particles in outer space events.
As more qubits are packaged onto the chip, these errors may make the chip no better than traditional computer chips. Therefore, since the 1990s, scientists have been studying quantum errors.
In a paper published Monday in Nature, Google said it found a way to string Willow chip Qubits together, so as the quantum number increases, the error rate drops. The company also said it can correct errors in real time, which is a key step in making its quantum machine practical.
“We’ve gone beyond the breakout point,” Hartmut Neven, who leads Google Quantum AI division, said in an interview.
In 2019, IBM questioned Google’s claim that Google’s quantum chips solved a problem that required a classic computer for 10,000 years, saying that the problem could be solved in two and a half days using different technical assumptions about classic systems.
This considers some of these issues in its latest estimates, Google said in a blog post on Monday. Even under the most idealistic conditions, it will take a billion years for classical computers to get the same results as the latest chips, Google said.
Anthony Megrant, chief architect of Google Quantum AI, said in an interview that some Google competitors are making chips that are more reliable than Google, but Google is focused on making the most reliable Qubits.
Google made previous chips in a shared facility at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but built its own dedicated manufacturing facility to produce its Willow chips. Megrant said the new facility will speed up the speed at which Google can make future chips that were experimented with a huge refrigerator called cryostat.
“If we have a good idea, we hope someone on the team can … get it into a clean room as soon as possible and go into one of the cryoters so we can get a lot of learning cycles,” Megrant said.
©Thomson Reuters 2024
(This story has not been edited by Tech Word News’s staff and is automatically generated from the joint feed.)
