Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Google started WillowIts latest quantum chip, Wednesday, and if you’ve been online since then, you’ve no doubt come across breathless reports about it. Willow “breaks old computers in cosmic time,” it declares one title; Google “reveals the ‘surprising chaos’ of computers,” someone reads. It’s all backed up by the fact that Willow can complete calculations that would take an ancient computer more time than the 14 billion years that the universe has existed. But, as you can imagine, what the chip represents is not that simple.
First of all, with Willow, Google is not talking about the general size, something of the company he said when it publicly released its previous generation computer, Sycamore, back in 2019. You may remember that, at the time, Google announced how Sycamore took only 200 seconds to calculate what would have taken the world. it’s a very fast computer 10,000 years to complete. This, the company said, showed it had built a supercomputer that could handle problems that supercomputers couldn’t attempt. In other words, Google was discovered the quantum dimension.
However, the claims quickly ended in controversy, with one analyst calling the company’s announcement “unsafe” and “false,” and Google avoiding talking about the size of the increase. Instead, it simply says that it has managed to “exceed previous calculations.” Part of the story was that Sycamore was not a quantum computer; instead, it was designed to outperform older computers in a single function known as random sampling or RCS. The thing about RCS is that, in Google’s own words, it “doesn’t have any universally recognized software.” However, here again, the company is showing off the performance of the RCS.
Google says Willow can complete its latest RCS benchmark in less than five minutes. In contrast, the company thinks it can take it Frontiercurrently the second most powerful computer in the world, 10 septillion years to complete the same task. That number, Google says, “believes that quantitative computing occurs in many parallel environments, consistent with the idea that we live in different environments.”
More than that, Google tries to say that RCS performance should be the metric by which all computers are measured. According to Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum AI, “it’s an entry point. If you can’t win at random rounds, you won’t win at any other algorithm.” He adds RCS “is now widely used as a standard in the field.”
However, some companies, including IBM and Honeywell wellinstead use a metric called quantum volume to measure their success. It is said to point to a comprehensive understanding of machine learning based on how qubits interact with each other. Unfortunately, you won’t find any mention of volume on the page Google shared on Willow, which makes comparisons difficult.
Until then, the most interesting claim Google is making today is that Willow is “under the door.” Until now, the problem that has plagued any attempt to build a quantum computer is that the quantum bits that have been set up are difficult to control. They only hold their quantum state for fractions of a second, and the more qubits are added to the system, the more errors they can make. However, with Willow, Google says it has found a way to reduce errors when adding qubits to the system. According to the company, Willow is the first time this has happened.
“As the first system below the limit, this is the most convincing example of a clear qubit built to date. It is a strong indication that practical, high-performance computers can be developed,” says Neven. “Willow brings us closer to implementing efficient, business-oriented algorithms that cannot be replicated on conventional computers.”
That’s the real discovery here, and it points to a future where digital computers can solve problems that have a tangible impact on people’s lives. That future, however, has yet to arrive, and even Google admits it has a lot of work to do before it gets there.
