Pichai said Willow, with 105 qubits, could perform standard calculations that would have taken a major traditional supercomputer more than 10 cetilion (10 to the power of 25) years to perform, far exceeding the age of the universe. ran in less than 5 minutes.
The post was immediately responded to by none other than Elon Musk, who said, “Wow,” followed by Pichai’s comment. “Someday we should create quantum clusters in space with starships.”
Is it a proposal for a joint venture, a hint at great innovation, or a way to improve government productivity under the person President-elect Donald Trump has chosen to run the Office of Government Efficiency?
Unlike traditional computers, which use binary numbers (a stream of 0s and 1s), quantum computers use “qubits” (which can take on any value between 0 and 1), making them extremely powerful . In fact, quantum computers have long been seen as a threat to traditional cryptography and security.
According to Irwin Emery, a character in the 1992 Hollywood film Sneakers starring Robert Redford, “Cryptographic systems are based on mathematical problems so complex that you can’t solve them without the key.” But in the movie, a mathematician named Gunter Janek designs the chip. You can decrypt all the world’s sensitive digital data in a small box.
In this way, the film foretold a future in which computers would be able to decrypt large amounts of encrypted data. In 1994, two years after the sneakers made their theatrical debut, Bell Labs mathematician Peter Scholl devised the mathematics to expose cryptography to quantum computers.
Thirty years later, is Google’s Willow really a turning point in human history?
According to a paper titled “Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold” published by Google Quantum AI and collaborators in the journal Nature on December 9th, it is possible to hunt down errors while increasing the number of qubits. , it is possible to achieve an exponential reduction in error rate. .
Alphabet Inc.’s Google is pursuing quantum computing, along with Microsoft, IBM and other tech giants. It’s interesting to note that while competitors are developing chips with more qubits, Google is focusing on qubit reliability. Qubits are fast, but error-prone. These errors can accumulate to the point where the chip is no different from a traditional computer chip because more qubits are packed into it.
Google claims in a paper in Nature that it can correct errors in real time, an important step toward making its quantum machines useful. Hartmut Neven, head of Google Quantum AI, said it’s “beyond breakeven.”
As for claims that it would take a supercomputer 1 billion years to do what Google’s Willow did in less than five minutes, the company admits that this figure was estimated based on conservative assumptions. In this context, the story of the Sycamore inevitably comes to mind.
In 2019, Google claimed that its Sycamore quantum chip, equipped with 53 qubits, solved a problem in 200 seconds that would take a traditional computer 10,000 years to complete. Pichai called the result a major shift in computing.
However, IBM quickly countered that it could complete the task more quickly (in 2.5 days) by changing the methodology of its supercomputer Summit. Then, in a 2022 paper published in Physical Review Letters titled “Solving the sampling problem in sycamore quantum circuits,” a team of Chinese researchers demonstrated how to defeat the sycamore. In fact, they proposed a classic solution.
Doubts about quantum’s superiority over conventional computers are likely to persist. Google says that even under the best of circumstances, it would take a normal computer a billion years to achieve the results that Willow achieves within minutes. Although it is currently impossible to disprove this, Google’s Sycamore experiment should be acknowledged for achieving its strategic goal of reigniting the quantum race.
Are we placing too much emphasis on Willow’s performance in a single test? Remember that quantum computers still have a long way to go before they are as useful as personal computers are today. It requires significant capital and operational expenditures to operate. It may take a few more decades to make it resemble the little box you’re given as an answering machine, like the one in your sneaker.
Google hopes quantum computers can solve problems in AI, health, and battery technology that are beyond the capabilities of current devices, even if its Willow chip is not currently available for commercial use. It is true that quantum computers have the potential to assist AI models, as they require extensive training.
Although quantum computers will not replace existing computers, many scientists believe they will outperform them in many, if not all, tasks.
A key question is whether quantum computing will make most of today’s cryptographic techniques obsolete. For example, could a quantum computer eventually break Bitcoin’s cryptographic security and spell the end for this crypto asset?
In the movie “Sneakers”, people regretted believing that regular encryption was safe. Perhaps there is still time for the world to devise security for the quantum age.
The author is a professor of statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
