A fresh debate regarding parallel universes has recently resurfaced among scientists following the new quantum computing advancement at Google, called the Willow chip. Hartmut Neven, the head of Google Quantum AI, attributes Willow’s exceptional speed with this interesting concept. In a matter of minutes, it can process tasks that traditional supercomputers can only do in billions of years. Willow’s features signify a big technological advancement and fuel enthusiasm and excitement toward the new possibilities unlocked about quantum mechanics.
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“Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements. 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. Second, 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 – a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe,” Hartmut Neven said in a blog post on Google’s website.
“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,” said the lead of Google Quantum AI in the blog post.