Google's Willow chip.....a revolutionary breakthrough

[andrewsaurus rex]

For anyone not familiar, this is a breakthrough in quantum computing.  Quantum computing offers the possibility of being able to rapidly solve problems....much faster than today's super computers can.

For example the new Willow chip solved a problem in 5 minutes that would take the best super computer a quadrillion times the age of the universe to solve, ie 13 billion quadrillion years.

Quantum computers take advantage of the decades old discoveries in quantum mechanics, such as entanglement.  One basic feature of quantum computers is that instead of using bits that are either a 1 or a 0 like all modern computers, it uses a single bit which can be both 1 and 0 or somewhere in between.  It's way too much to explain here and i only have a layman's grasp of it but this is truly revolutionary.

Until the Willow chip, the problem has been eliminating errors.  And this is where the Google's chip comes in.  It has an error rate of essentially zero.  Whereas other chips have had error rates of 1/1000.....when doing massive amounts of computations to solve a problem, that was far too high.

The biggest hurdle now is to figure out what to do with this new technology....but that is a very easy problem to solve, with some time and some thought.

Between the breakthroughs in AI and now with quantum computing our society is going to radically change over the coming years.  Let's hope it's for the better.