Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ The Google Willow thing

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

The news here is Google's fault-tolerance milestone in its Willow quantum computing chip, the publication stamp (paywalled on Nature) having been placed on the preprint on arXiv from August. "Scientifically," writes Scott Aaronson, "the headline result is that, as they increase the size of their surface code, from 3×3 to 5×5 to 7×7, Google finds that their encoded logical qubit stays alive for longer rather than shorter." But the most interesting bit to me is this: "it would also take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer's results" Hence, "all validation of Google's new supremacy experiment is indirect." 

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Dec 12, 2024 02:56 a.m.

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