Google's new breakthrough quantum computing chip says 'we live in a multiverse'

Quantum computing, much like the acronym AI (artificial intelligence), has been caught in the lexicon as a piece of technology we will much more widely integrate into society sometime in the future. Today, that future just took a much bigger than anticipated step closer to the present, as Google has unveiled "Willow," the company's most advanced quantum processor.

Quantum computing has been around since the 1990s, and engineers, physicists, and scientists alike have been battling one big but tiny problem with implementing the technology: the number of errors it generates. Firstly, quantum computing is completely different than classical computers, which conduct calculations based on whether a bit is a 0 or a 1. However, quantum computing changes things, as it uses tiny pieces of information called qubits, or quantum bits, which can be on, off, or both.

Moreover, quantum computing also introduces quantum entanglement, an observable phenomenon that connects two particles together, synchronizing their states. The quantum entangled particles aren't restricted in distance, as their connection can stretch as far as the other side of the universe. But what does that all have to do with computing? Quantum computers are designed to exploit the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the study of how physical matter exhibits the properties of both particles and waves, but there are a few problems that need to be worked out first.

For example, quantum computing is extremely difficult given the error rate for calculations, as the more qubits that are introduced, the higher the error rate. Google has set out to solve this problem with Willow, as the company explains in its announcement that by combining quantum error connection techniques with the powerful quantum processor, it was able to create the "first processor where error-corrected qubits get exponentially better as they get bigger."

Until now, when more qubits were introduced into a system and they weren't isolated correctly, it would create quantum decoherence, which is noise within the calculations that leads to errors. According to Google, even state-of-the-art quantum computers such as Willow experience an error one failure in every thousand operations, hence the need to increase the reliability of quantum computing.

"Willow's performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch," wrote Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven

So, what does the future hold now that Willow exists? Willow is simply another milestone step in the long road to create an error-free quantum computer, and according to Google's research blog post about Willow, all of this was achieved with a 105-qubit processor, and since Willow can now scale up qubits without suffering from an exponentially growing error rate, Google says it can now pursue a 1,000 qubit processor.

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"At current physical error rates, we might need more than a thousand physical qubits per surface code grid to realize relatively modest encoded error rates of 10-6. Furthermore, all of this was accomplished on a 105-qubit processor; can we achieve the same performance on a 1,000-qubit processor? What about a million-qubit processor? The engineering challenge ahead of us is immense," writes Google researchers