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Google unveils new quantum chip, says it performs calculations in multiple parallel universes

2024-12-13 20:58:14Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Google unveils new quantum chip, says it performs calculations in multiple
Google's quantum chip

Google has made a shocking claim, saying that their quantum chip unveiled a few days ago may be tapping into parallel universes to achieve its results.

The search giant recently unveiled a new quantum computer chip, called Willow, which, at least on one specific benchmark, the company says can outperform any supercomputer in the world.

"Willow's performance on this benchmark is astonishing," Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in a post announcing the chip. "It performed a calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 to the power of 25, or 10 septillion years."

"This astonishing number exceeds the time scales known in physics and far exceeds the age of the universe," he argued. "It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, consistent with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch," he said.

Deutsch is a physicist who put forward his multiverse hypothesis in a 1997 book called "The Fabric of Reality," in which he suggested that quantum computer calculations could be performed across multiple universes at the same time.

Put another way, Google is suggesting that its chip is so fast that its calculations could have taken place in parallel universes, a bombastic statement that unsurprisingly attracted a lot of skepticism online.

The calculation Willow was tasked with solving was of no use to anyone.

"The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution," German physicist and science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder wrote on Twitter in response to Google's announcement. "The result of this calculation has no practical use," she said.

“They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entanglement),” she added. “It also allows them to say things like ‘this would have taken a septillion years on a conventional computer,’ etc.,” Hossenfelder said, expressing skepticism.

Willow is a 100-qubit, or quantum-bit, chip. Unlike conventional computers, which use "zeros" and "ones" for a binary system, quantum computers rely on "qubits," which can be on, off, or, counterintuitively, both thanks to quantum entanglement, the mysterious phenomenon that allows particles to influence each other's states even when separated by distance.

"It's exactly the same calculation they did in 2019 on a chip of about 50 qubits," Hossenfelder wrote.

At the time, Google made a similarly bombastic claim, arguing that it had achieved “quantum supremacy,” or “the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, regardless of whether those tasks are useful,” as John Preskill, who first coined the term in 2012, puts it.

This last part seems to be particularly important, given Google's recent claim.

"So while the announcement is super impressive from a scientific point of view and all, the implications for everyday life are zero," Hossenfelder argued. "Estimates say we'll need about 1 million qubits for practically useful applications, and we're still about 1 million qubits away from that."

The physicist also suggested that such wild claims could "evaporate because some other group finds a clever way to do this on a conventional computer."

Google's claim to quantum supremacy drew immediate criticism in 2019, sparking a long-running standoff between the company and quantum computing rival IBM. At the time, IBM researchers accused Google of overstating its claims.

In a follow-up blog post from 2023, IBM researchers argued that the problem that Google's quantum computer was tasked with solving in 2019 could "be done on a classical system in 2.5 days and with much greater reliability."


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