Willow: Google says new chip is peerless, can solve problem in minutes

Popular search engine Google on Monday said it has made a significant advancement in quantum computing with its new chip that has the potential to solve complex mathematical problems in just five minutes, which classical computers would take a significantly longer time than recorded in the history of the universe to find a solution.

The chip is named Willow.

In a Google Blog post, the company said: “The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.”

“Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe,” the blog post said.

As a measure of Willow’s performance, Google’s experts said they used the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark.

Speaking on the performance of the chip, the company said in its blog post: “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.”

With 105 qubits, Willow, as claimed by Google, now has best-in-class performance across the two system benchmarks: quantum error correction and random circuit sampling.

Google says such algorithmic benchmarks are the best way to measure overall chip performance.

“Today in Nature, we published results showing that the more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes,” the search engine said.