Your relatives who took handwritten notes all their lives are going to have something to say about this: Yesterday, Google debuted Willow, a new quantum chip that the company said needs less than five minutes to complete a test problem that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years to figure out.
Thirty-year setback, solved: The more processing bits (called “qubits”) that a quantum computer has, the more powerful it is, but the more errors that occur, too—until now. For the first time in quantum computing, adding more qubits to Willow reduced the error rate, which is a critical step toward scaling this type of computing, Google’s Quantum AI lab said.
Nuts and bolts, simplified: Whereas regular computers translate our little tappy-tappies via binary bits represented by 0s or 1s, quantum computers’ qubits exist in multiple states at once, like Schrödinger’s cat. This exponentially speeds up problem-solving, which can expedite drug trials, nuclear reactor construction, AI testing, and a host of other innovations.
But…a post-quantum world could present cyber dangers: Quantum computers with enough power could potentially crack even the strongest encryptions, which is why Apple announced in February that it was attempting to “quantum-proof” iMessage encryption.
Willow is still experimental. But with governments around the world dumping billions of dollars into research, quantum computing could start to meaningfully change our lives in five years, an Oxford researcher told The Guardian.—ML