Alphabet Inc.’s Google has taken a quantum leap with its new Willow chip.
Put it this way: The chip performed a computational task that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years in under five minutes, percolating talk in the scientific community about the possibility of parallel universes — a concept introduced by physicist David Deutsch in the book, “The Fabric of Reality” (1997).
“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe,” Hartmut Neven, founder of Google Quantum AI, said in a blog post on Monday.
Willow’s mind-blowing performance “lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse,” said Neven.
Google’s breakthrough is “one of the highlights of the recent decade” and could mean quantum computers are a step closer to being used for more practical purposes, Javad Shabani, physics professor and director of the Center of Quantum Information Physics at New York University, told Fortune.
The race to develop quantum computers has become a Holy Grail of sorts for tech companies to solve complex problems far beyond the realm of traditional computers. But unlike digital computers that use 0s and 1s, quantum computers use qubits, which operate under the principles of quantum mechanics to process information at much higher speeds.
This week, China said it reached a milestone in quantum computing with Tianyan-504, a powerful 504-qubit quantum computer. The computer will be incorporated into the Tianyan quantum computing cloud platform, giving users access worldwide.
“In the last 24 months, we’ve seen significant milestones and breakthroughs across a variety of architectural approaches to building scalable quantum computers that are fault tolerant,” Karl Holmqvist, founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Lastwall, said in an email.
