Google Has Possibly Cracked a Quantum Computing Challenge and Outpaced Supercomputers With "Willow" Google will now focus on demonstrating the first "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips relevant to a real-world application

Google announced a significant advancement in the field of quantum computing with its next-generation chip called 'Willow'.

On Tuesday, the tech giant revealed its state-of-the-art chip after investing in it for a decade.

"The vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the "operating system" of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society's greatest challenges," said Hartmut Neven founder and lead, Google Quantum AI.

Willow has been noted to bag two major achievements- reducing errors exponentially while scaling up using more qubits (the units of computation in quantum computers) and performing a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (i.e 10²⁵) years— a number exceeding the age of the Universe.

Google will now focus on demonstrating the first "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips relevant to a real-world application. To achieve the same, it is running two experiments- the RCS benchmark, focused on measuring performance against classical computers that have no known real-world applications and simulations of quantum systems that can lead to new scientific discoveries but are still within the reach of classical computers.

"Our goal is to do both at the same time — to step into the realm of algorithms that are beyond the reach of classical computers and that are useful for real-world, commercially relevant problems," added Neven.

With this announcement, the shares of parent company Alphabet rose over five per cent on Tuesday.