Google, a company owned by Alphabet Inc., has launched an algorithm on its "Willow" quantum computing chip that can be replicated on similar platforms and outperform classical supercomputers. This breakthrough paves the way for useful applications of quantum technology within five years, UNN reports with reference to Bloomberg.
Details
The "Quantum Echoes" algorithm, detailed in a paper published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, is verifiable, meaning it can be replicated on another quantum computer. It also ran 13,000 times faster than is possible on the world's best supercomputer, Google said. Overall, these advances point to a wide range of potential applications in medicine and materials science, Google said.
The key to verifiability is that it's a huge step toward real-world applications. By achieving this result, we are really pushing ourselves to find the mainstream.
Alphabet shares rose as much as 2.4% on Wednesday in New York trading. The breakthrough brings Google a step closer to harnessing the computing power promised by quantum computing, which rivals Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp., and numerous startups are also pursuing. This comes after Google announced in December that Willow solved a problem in five minutes that would have taken a supercomputer 10 septillion years.
Quantum computers use tiny circuits to perform calculations, as traditional computers do, but they perform these calculations in parallel rather than sequentially, making them much faster. While firms have boasted of creating quantum platforms that outperform classical computers, their challenge has been to find a useful application.
Computer scientist Scott Aaronson, who was not involved in the research, wrote in an email that he was "thrilled" with Google's progress in outperforming supercomputers in a way that could be effectively replicated, and thus proven, on a second quantum computer, which had been "one of the biggest challenges in the field for the past few years." Nevertheless, he warned that much work remains to be done.
Getting from this to something commercially useful and/or to scalable fault tolerance (which was not used for this demonstration) will be additional major challenges.
One application of the algorithm is to study molecular structures by calculating distances between atoms, the scientists showed in a second co-authored paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed. The method could be applied to drug discovery and materials science, including battery development, although this would require a quantum computer 10,000 times larger than current working machines, Google scientists estimated.
The Google team, which includes 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Michel H. Devoret, said it plans to continue moving toward real-world applications by scaling and improving the accuracy of its machines.
Addition
Shares of Alphabet Inc., Google's owner, fell by $100 billion in market capitalization after OpenAI announced its Atlas browser. Atlas is an AI-powered web browser. It was built on ChatGPT, which is already running on Apple computers.