What is Willow? Google’s ‘astonishing’ quantum leap explained

What is Willow? Google has made an incredible quantum computing breakthrough this week that it says lends credence to a theory that we live in a multiverse. Wow. Let’s take a closer look.

Earlier this week, Google announced a new computing chip called Willow, which looks to be an astonishing breakthrough towards a quantum computing future.

The new Willow chip, according to Google achieves a couple of key breakthroughs in its decade-long efforts to harness quantum mechanics, often dubbed, the “operating system of nature”.

Success in these efforts, Google says, could lead to currently-out-of-reach scientific discoveries like faster development of lifesaving medicines and treatments.

In a blog post on Monday, Google explained the two major breakthroughs enabled by the new Willow chip. We’ll break them down below.

Error correction

“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,” Google says

This first major breakthrough is significant because quantum computing processes currently are inherently error-ridden.

Google explains: “Errors are one of the greatest challenges in quantum computing, since qubits, the units of computation in quantum computers, have a tendency to rapidly exchange information with their environment, making it difficult to protect the information needed to complete a computation. Typically the more qubits you use, the more errors will occur, and the system becomes classical.”

What Google has achieved with Willow is significant because it has reversed this trend. The more qubits (think quantum bits) used in Willow, the more errors were reduced. Essentially, Google has cut the error rate in half.

“You must demonstrate being below threshold to show real progress on error correction, and this has been an outstanding challenge since quantum error correction was introduced by Peter Shor in 1995,” Google added in the blog post.

Unfathomable benchmarking performance

So, this one feels pretty big. Using an industry standard benchmarking test designed to check whether a quantum computer is doing anything a regular ol’ computer cannot Google got a quite conclusive answer.

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

Ten septillion years is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s beyond any known timescales in physics, Google says.

And Marvel fans, you’re going to love this one. “The results lend credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse.”

Can’t wait to discover what I’m doing in my other universes.

You can learn more about Willow in the video below, published by Google this week.

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