Google has announced its latest quantum chip, Willow, which achieves astonishing performance and demonstrates quantum error correction. With 105 qubits, Willow has “best-in-class” performance on the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark.

According to the announcement:

• 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. The results, published in Nature, show that “the more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes,” says Hartmut Neven, Founder and Lead, Google Quantum AI.
• 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.

In terms of performance on the RCS benchmark, Neven says:

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: 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. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

Read more at Google.