Google has achieved a new milestone in quantum computing that, according to Hartmut Nevenfounder and leader of Google Quantum AI, ‘is a significant advance towards commercially relevant applications’. The achievement has been achieved with a new quantum chip 105 qubitsdeveloped by the company itself, with which has demonstrated the theory of error correction formulated by Peter Shor in 1995according to the company in a study published in Nature.
The fundamental difference between a traditional computer and a quantum one is that the former works with bits and the second with qubits. In the first case, they can have a value of 0 or 1; in the second, of 0, 1 or both at the same timeso the calculation capacity derived is much greater. If more qubits are added, this grows exponentially, not sequentially.
But quantum computers require very precise conditions to operate and are prone to errors. A qubit can easily lose its ‘superposition’ state due to external interference or errors in its manipulation. Mathematician Shor’s error correction theory pointed out a method to protect quantum information from errors distributing the information of a qubit in several. This way, if one of those qubits is damaged or changed, the system can detect the error and correct it using the other qubits. Thus, by adding more qubits, the system is more protected.
With Willow, Google demonstrates for the first time that this theory can be successfully put into practice and achieve, with this chip, solve a reference task in 5 minutes (RCS, computing random quantum circuits) that it would take a supercomputer like Frontier 10 septillion yearsaccording to Neven, who also points out that they have achieved reduce error rate by half.
This achievement represents a step forward in the development of quantum computers capable of executing tasks that are too complex for classical computing or require extremely long times to carry out and in which companies such as IBM, Google and others have been working for years.