Google has taken a major step towards creating a quantum computer, after unveiling a ‘mind-boggling’ quantum chip – its most powerful yet.
Measuring 1.5-inches (4cm) – a little larger than an After Eight mint – the chip takes five minutes to complete tasks that would take conventional computers 10 septillion years.
That’s 10 followed by 24 zeroes, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – so more time than the history of the universe.
Crucially, Google’s chip has demonstrated the ability to reduce computational errors exponentially as it scales up – a feat that has eluded researchers for nearly 30 years.
Ultimately, the aim is to build a ‘commercial’ quantum computer – one that could be purchased by members of the public and used in labs, offices, and even homes.
As this is still a decade or two away at least, for now, firms like Google and IBM are building ‘experimental’ quantum computers that are still in the research and development phase.
In the near future, scientists expect quantum computers will replace the ‘classical’ computers at our desks and revolutionise our lives.
These ultra-powerful machines, which use the spooky effects of quantum physics, could do everything from speed up AI, solve climate change and discover lifesaving drugs.
While still in its early stages, scientists believe quantum computers will eventually be able to power innovation in a range of fields such as AI, drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design and more.
Hartmut Neven, quantum scientist and founder of Google’s Quantum AI lab, said this new Willow chip, developed at its Santa Barbara, California lab, ‘paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer’.
‘Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years,’ he said.
‘This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe.
‘The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first “useful, beyond-classical” computation on today’s quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application.’
On X, Google CEO Sundar Pichai added: ‘We see Willow as an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications in areas like drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design and more.’
According to Google, Willow can run 105 ‘qubits’ – the basic unit of information in quantum computing, with more qubits meaning more power.
This is more than its Sycamore chip – first revealed in 2019 – which debuted at 53 qubits and eventually reached 70 qubits.
Quantum technology makes use of the spooky effects of quantum physics to vastly speed up information processing, which could lead to the most powerful computer on Earth.
Even the fastest computers that exist today – such as El Capitan in California and Frontier in Tennessee – don’t match the potential of quantum computers.
Conventional or ‘classical’ computers function in binary fashion – they carry out tasks using tiny fragments of data known as bits that are only ever either expressed as 1 or 0.
But fragments of data on a quantum computer, known as qubits, can be both 1 and 0 at the same time – allowing them to crunch an enormous number of potential outcomes simultaneously.
Qubits are fast but error-prone, because they can be jostled by something as small as a subatomic particle from events in outer space.
As more qubits are packed onto a chip, those errors can add up to make the chip no better than a conventional computer chip.
‘Typically the more qubits you use, the more errors will occur, and the system becomes classical,’ Neven said.
Scientists have been working on this conundrum since the 1990s and Google claims to have finally cracked it.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, Google said that it has found a way to string together the Willow chip’s qubits so that error rates go down as the number of qubits goes up.
The company also says it can correct errors in real time – a fundamental requirement for building practical quantum computers.
‘The more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes,’ said Neven.
Error correction is the ‘end game’ in quantum computing and Google is ‘confidently progressing’ along the path, according to Google.
Professor Winfried Hensinger, director of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies, called this a ‘very important milestone’ for making quantum computers.
However, he added that Willow is ‘still well too small to do useful calculations’ and has ‘not enabled quantum advantage for any useful industry applications’.
‘Quantum computers that can be used for some of the really important industry problems will require millions of qubits,’ he told MailOnline.
‘But this result yet increases our confidence further that humanity will be able to build practical quantum computers enabling some of the high impactful applications quantum computers are known for.’
Back in 2019, when it debuted its Sycamore chip, Google claimed it was the first to achieve what’s known in the industry as ‘quantum supremacy’.
This is where someone has shown that their quantum computer has done something than a conventional computer couldn’t have done in that timeframe.
However, critics including Professor Hensinger pointed out that it only had 20 qubits which is nowhere near powerful enough to claim quantum supremacy.
Last year, Google said an improved version of Sycamore was capable of instantly making calculations that would take even the fastest computer in existence today 47 years to do.
However, Professor Sebastian Weidt, from the University of Sussex’s Ion Quantum Technology group, said Google is yet to demonstrate solving a useful problem with quantum.
‘We really must get to utility quantum computing – an era where quantum computers with many thousand qubits actually begin to deliver value to society in a way that classical computers never will be able to,’ he said at the time.
Google is famously in competition with IBM, which has already created a quantum machine called Q System One, available for businesses and researchers to use.
MailOnline has contacted IBM for comment.
