Google says it had a major quantum error correction breakthrough, unveils its Willow quantum chip
This could end up being the headline from this year in tech that we look back on in history, sort of like we look back on the Attention Is All You Need paper for AI. Google says it had a major quantum error correction breakthrough, as it unveils its Willow quantum chip with 105 improved qubits. Quoting the NYTimes:
Google said its quantum computer, based on a computer chip called Willow, needed less than five minutes to perform a mathematical calculation that one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers could not complete in 10 septillion years, that’s 10 to the 24 years, a length of time that exceeds the age of the known universe.
Quantum computing — the result of decades of research into a type of physics called quantum mechanics — is still an experimental technology. But Google’s achievement shows that scientists are steadily improving techniques that could allow quantum computing to live up to the enormous expectations that have surrounded this big idea for decades.
“When quantum computing was originally envisioned, many people — including many leaders in the field — felt that it would never be a practical thing,” said Mikhail Lukin, a professor of physics at Harvard and a co-founder of the quantum computing start-up QuEra. “What has happened over the last year shows that it is no longer science fiction.” ENDQUOTE
And quoting HPCWire:
It’s rare to catch Google in a talkative mood, but the technology giant held a media/analyst briefing before today’s announcement with handful of prominent members of the Google Quantum-AI team. Demonstrating the ability to break the QEC threshold was really the biggest news of the day. Doing that required many advances in the chip itself as Google progressed from its Sycamore line to the Willow line. High-error rates, particularly in superconducting qubits, have limited their usefulness so far.
Michael Newman, Google research scientist, explained, “Quantum Information is extremely fragile. It can be disrupted by many things ranging from microscopic material defects to ionizing radiation to cosmic rays, and unfortunately, to enact these large scale quantum algorithms that have all this promise, we need to sometimes reliably manipulate this information for billions, if not trillions, of steps, whereas typically we see failures on the order of one in 1000 or one in 10,000 so we need our qubits to be almost perfect, and we can’t get there with engineering alone.”
The way to make almost perfect qubits is with quantum error correction or QEC. So the basic idea is, you take many physical qubits and have them work together to represent a single logical qubit. The physical qubits work together to correct errors, and the hope is that as you make these collections larger and larger, there’s more and more error correction. The problem is that as these things are getting larger, there’s also more opportunities for error.
One of the researchers said: “In terms of [go-to-market] models, there is a number out there. One of the most obvious in our consideration is offering access through cloud. That is something we are currently working on. Looking beyond that, I think there are certainly opportunities to support even jobs running at Google, as well as potentially in larger, very specific on-prem or other types of models, so TBD on those, but we are currently working on cloud.”
Neven quickly added, “The Willow chip is a nice piece of hardware, and it has enormous raw compute power. So we have ambitions to show that already, with such a platform, you may be able to do useful algorithms. That’s not the conversation for this press round table, but we take an IOU and watch us over the next year.” ENDQUOTE