Google Parent Company Alphabet Makes Breakthrough in Quantum Computing

The alphabet which is the parent company of google makes its way breakthrough in Quantum Computing

The hype surrounding the rise of ChatGPT and the alleged ground Google is losing in the search wars to Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI has overshadowed more significant developments in computing, progress that will have far greater implications than which website provides better tax advice.

The holy grail of scientists and researchers is quantum computing, but it is still decades away from becoming a reality. However, Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, moved the ball down the field last month when it announced that it had discovered ways to address one of the nascent field's biggest issues: accuracy.

Until now, all computing has been done on a binary scale. A piece of data is stored as a 1 or a 0, and these binary units (bits) are grouped for further calculation. For example, the number 8 (1000 in binary) requires 4 bits to be stored. It's slow and clumsy, but it's simple and precise. For nearly seven decades, silicon chips have been storing and processing bits.

Quantum bits, or qubits, can store information in more than two ways (it can be both 1 and 0 at the same time). This means that larger amounts of data can be processed in a given amount of time. One of the many drawbacks is that the physical manifestation of a qubit requires extremely cold temperatures-just above 0 degrees Kelvin-and is vulnerable to even minor interference, such as light. They're also prone to errors, which is a major issue in computing.

Google claims to have made a significant breakthrough in an important subfield known as quantum error correction in a paper published in Nature last month. The strategy is straightforward. Scientists store information across many physical qubits rather than relying on individual ones, and then view this collection as a single one (called a logical qubit).

Google hypothesized that clumping a greater number of physical qubits together to form a single logical qubit would reduce the error rate. The team discovered in its research paper, which was detailed in a blog post by Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, that a logical qubit formed from 49 physical qubits outperformed one composed of 17.

In reality, devoting 49 qubits to the handling of a single logical one appears inefficient, if not excessive. Consider storing your photos on 49 hard drives to ensure that a single hard drive is error-free. However, given the enormous potential of quantum computing, even such baby steps represent significant progress.

More importantly, it provides the broader scientific community with a foundation from which to advance related fields such as materials science, mathematics, and electrical engineering, all of which will be required to make an actual quantum computer a reality. The goal of developing a system that can solve a problem that no current machine can handle is known as quantum supremacy. Four years ago, Google announced that it had completed a test in 200 seconds that would take conventional supercomputers thousands of years to complete, demonstrating that we are on the path to quantum supremacy.