Google scientists said on Wednesday that they have passed a major milestone in their quest to develop effective quantum computing, with a new study showing they reduced the rate of errors — long an obstacle for the much-hyped technology.
According to some, quantum computing is a breakthrough development that will enable us to build machines with capabilities that are unimaginably greater than those of today’s conventional computers.
Unfortunately, the technology is still essentially hypothetical and faces other difficult obstacles, such as persistently high error rates.
The Google Quantum AI lab recently published new research in the journal Nature that revealed a method that can dramatically reduce the mistake rate.
The Google Quantum AI lab recently published new research in the journal Nature that revealed a method that can dramatically reduce the mistake rate.
This would put the US tech titan ahead of competitors like IBM, which is also developing superconducting quantum processors.
Whereas conventional computers utilize bits, which can only be represented by 0 or 1, quantum computers employ qubits, which can simultaneously represent both 0 and 1.
A quantum computer may concurrently calculate an enormous number of possible outcomes because of the superposition property.
A quantum computer may concurrently calculate an enormous number of possible outcomes because of the superposition property.
The computers use some of the most astounding features of quantum mechanics, such as the “entanglement” phenomenon, which allows two bits from a pair to coexist in the same state despite being physically separated from one another.
Nevertheless, when qubits leave their quantum state and interact with the outside world, they may lose their information due to a condition known as decoherence.
High error rates brought on by this fragility, which likewise rises with the number of qubits, frustrates researchers who wish to scale up their experiments.
A system using error-correcting coding, however, may detect and rectify problems without altering the information, according to Google’s team, which claimed to have done so for the first time in practice.
The technique was first proposed in the 1990s, but prior attempts had only resulted in more errors, not fewer, according to Google’s Hartmut Neven, a research co-author.
Neven stated at a press conference that if all system components have sufficiently low error rates, “then the magic of quantum error correction kicks in.”
The breakthrough was praised as “a critical scientific milestone” by research co-author Julian Kelly, who added that “quantum error correction is the single most crucial technique for the future of quantum computing.”
The outcome, according to Neven, is still “not good enough; we need to get an absolutely low error rate.”
To realize the goal of a practical quantum computer, he continued, “there are more steps to come.”
When the tech firm said its Sycamore machine completed a computation in 200 seconds that would have taken a normal supercomputer 10,000 years to complete, Google claimed in 2019 that it had achieved a milestone known as “quantum supremacy.”
Chinese experts said last year that a supercomputer might have outperformed Sycamore’s time, casting doubt on the accomplishment in the years afterward.
