Google's "Willow" quantum chip won't just change future computers, it could change the world

Google has unveiled Willow, its latest quantum chip as it showcases progress towards a building a quantum computer. This aims to bring almost unimaginable amounts of power to computing.

To highlight just how powerful Willow is, Google said that it solved a benchmarking test in just 5 minutes – a test that, in comparison, would take today’s best supercomputers 10 septillion years to complete. That's a number that "vastly exceeds the age of the Universe”, it candidly added.

Google said that it was surprised at just how much of a leap ahead Willow achieved compared to the best of current computing. It added that quantum processors “are peeling away at a double exponential rate”. If you think that today’s computers are powerful, they barely even scratch the surface at what could be possible with a quantum computer.

Google isn’t just showing off with its new hardware, which was fabricated at a state-of-the-art facility in Santa Barbara, California, there’s serious science happening here too. The Google team published a paper in Nature, reporting on error correction, addressing a long-standing issue in quantum computing.

Google reports that as more “qubits” are added, the error suppression is greater, which helps pave the way towards a scalable quantum computer that can harness this power to do something useful.

Quantum chips rely on qubits, which is the unit of information in this next-gen hardware. But, unlike the binary bits used in current computers, qubits can exist in a state of 0 or 1 or both at the same time.

Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip - YouTube

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At the moment quantum computers are a puzzle for researchers, they are hard to understand and control, but the research is leading to tangible results that might one day result in something extremely powerful and if great use to humanity. Yes, it sounds silly, but proving a real-world application that’s better than current computers is one of the challenges.

Google says that while Willow has completed its benchmark and made new discoveries, some of these things are still within the possibilities of current computers. The aim of quantum computing is to get access to things that currently cannot be achieved.

We’ve already seen the advantages that more power can bring to things like AI and it makes sense to think about quantum computing in the same frame of reference. When you can feed massive amounts of information into your computer and get tangible results from it – be that developing new drugs, designing new battery technologies or understanding fusion reactors – then quantum computing will have something useful to do.

Of course, for all the good a quantum computer could achieve, there’s also the bad – designing new viruses and weapons, cracking encryption codes, unparalleled state surveillance, not to mention the potential for AI power that’s off the current scale.

For better or for worse, that could change the world as we know it.