San Francisco, December 10 (Xinhua) -- Google announced on the 9th the launch of its latest quantum chip, Willow. Google CEO Sundar Pichai called it an important step towards building practical quantum computers.
Google announced in its official blog post that Willow has achieved two major accomplishments: firstly, using more qubits for scaling can significantly reduce errors, solving a key challenge that quantum error correction has been trying to overcome for nearly 30 years. In addition, Willow demonstrated very high performance in standard benchmark calculation tests.
Quantum bits use superposition states for computation and are extremely sensitive to environmental disturbances. Usually, the more qubits there are, the more errors will occur, and new research can help solve this problem. This study, published in the journal Nature, shows that the more qubits used in Willow chips, the lower the error rate of the system, achieving a historic achievement of 'below threshold' by reducing error rates while increasing the number of qubits.
Hartmut Nevin, founder and leader of Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, said that as the first system below the threshold, this is the most reliable scalable logic qubit prototype to date. The launch of Willow chips has taken a big step towards commercial applications of quantum computing. The next challenge is to demonstrate the ability of quantum chips to surpass classical computers and solve real-world problems.
The article also states that Google's pioneering Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) benchmark has been widely used in the field of quantum computing and is the most difficult classical benchmark achievable by quantum computers today. Willow achieved amazing performance based on this benchmark, completing calculations that today's leading supercomputers would take 10 ^ 25 years to complete in less than five minutes. This incredible number exceeds the known time scales in physics and far exceeds the age of the universe.
The article states that artificial intelligence and quantum computing will be proven to be the two most transformative technologies of our time, and advanced artificial intelligence will benefit greatly from quantum computing. This is also the reason why he named the laboratory Quantum Artificial Intelligence.