Google's Willow chip: A quantum leap in error correction and scalability

Quantum computing has to tackle error correction if it is to become viable in the commercial sense

Google’s latest quantum chip, Willow, may have achieved a big breakthrough in terms of solving the intractable challenge of error correction in quantum computing. If this effect is replicable, it introduces the possibility of scaling up quantum computing to tackle many problems that are impossible with conventional, classical supercomputers. Google claims Willow, which is a 105-qubit (quantum bit) system, has demonstrated two key capabilities. One, it solves certain problems much faster. The benchmark used was a random circuit sampling (RCS) problem — essentially a method of proving that a sequence of numbers, or paths, is random. Willow took around five