Google has announced a new chip it considers to be a major milestone on the road to the future of computing.
Named Willow, the chip is key to Google's plans to build a scaled-up quantum computer – a piece of tech that has the potential to solve much more complicated problems than classical computers.
Google claims that Willow was able to complete one particular problem in five minutes, while the same task would have taken today's supercomputers 10 septillion years — or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 — to finish.
That's longer than the universe has existed.
What's the difference between a quantum computer and a regular computer?
"Quantum computers, their ability to do multiple tasks at once, allows them to explore a much larger range of possibilities than is available to classical computers, which can really only do one thing at a time," Seth Lloyd, professor of quantum mechanical engineering at MIT, explained to Morning Edition.
Lloyd made the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer.
"A classical computer is like a Gregorian chant, there's only one line and that's what you get. Whereas a quantum computation is like a symphony," added Lloyd. "There are all these different computations happening at once."
The fundamental difference comes down to bits - the smallest pieces of digital information.
In a classical computer, a bit is binary, with a value of either one or zero.
In a quantum computer, the equivalent is a quantum bit (or qubit for short.)
A qubit follows the principle of quantum mechanics – a field of physics that explains the nature of very small things like atoms and even smaller particles. They can be one, or zero, or a mix of the two, or both at the same time.
Is Google's announcement a big deal?
The challenge quantum engineers have faced for years is that qubits are extremely sensitive to their environment.
"One of the early quantum computers we had, you couldn't talk in the same room where the superconducting qubit was," Lloyd remembers, "because the vibrations from your voice would get inside the helium dilution refrigerator and cause problems with the qubit."
Often, the more qubits inside a quantum computer, the more errors it would make.
Google claims to have turned that on its head, adding qubits to Willow to correct errors instead.
"Being able to have a quantum computer where they can actually correct the errors that occur is a huge step towards making a scalable quantum computer," Lloyd told NPR, although he added that Google has "a long way to go."
How would quantum computers be used?
In its promotional video for Willow, Google said that a scaled-up quantum computer could have a number of useful applications, like helping design drugs with more certainty about how they'd interact with a disease, or run better simulations of new battery technology.
Google even hopes that a quantum computer could help to design the holy grail of clean technology - a working nuclear fission reactor.
What Willow can do now is far less useful, says Chris Monroe, a professor at Duke University's Quantum Center. Instead, he sees quantum computers as being key to the future of encryption.
"We should talk about cryptography because it's a particular application that quantum computers are good at and it's easily testable," Monroe told NPR.
What Google achieved with Willow "isn't testable," he added, because it generated a certain pattern of random numbers in a test called Random Circuit Sampling.
Instead, Monroe said a better test of a quantum computer would be to encrypt a poem and have the machine try to crack it.
"If you've broken that encryption, it's very easy to test it because then you can read the poem right back to me," Monroe added.
The possibility that quantum computing could break encryption led Apple back in February to announce a new way of securing iMessages on their customers' iPhones.
A lot of hype
Ultimately, Monroe believes that what we're hearing now from the field is mostly overblown.
While he thinks it's great that companies are now building quantum computers, "the not so great thing… is that they are hyping the field like crazy. Announcements [are] happening every week and most of them are ridiculous," he said.
Both Monroe and MIT's Lloyd think the day we see a true scaled-up quantum computer is years away. So it may be some time before qubits are unlocking the secrets of the universe.
The digital version of this piece was edited by Obed Manuel and produced by Majd Al-Waheidi.
(Editor's note: Google is a financial sponsor of NPR, but we cover them like any other company.)
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