In a groundbreaking development, Microsoft and Quantinuum have taken a significant step towards making quantum computers a commercial reality by enhancing their reliability.
The race to perfect quantum computing is heating up, with major tech firms like Microsoft, Alphabet's Google, and IBM competing alongside rivals and nation-states. These companies aim to harness quantum mechanics to create machines that can perform calculations at speeds exponentially faster than today’s classical silicon-based computers. Such advancements could enable scientific computations that would otherwise take millions of years to complete.
The core of quantum computing lies in the qubit, the fundamental unit that, despite its potential for incredible speed, is notoriously unstable and prone to errors when disturbed. To mitigate this, quantum researchers typically use error-correction techniques, deploying more physical qubits than necessary to produce a smaller number of reliable and useful qubits.
Microsoft and Quantinuum have announced a breakthrough in this area. By applying a proprietary error-correction algorithm developed by Microsoft to Quantinuum’s physical qubits, they successfully generated approximately four reliable qubits from 30 physical ones.
Jason Zander, Microsoft's executive vice president for strategic missions and technologies, stated, \"We ran more than 14,000 individual experiments without a single error. That's up to 800 times better than anything on record.\" This achievement, according to Zander, represents the best ratio of reliable qubits ever demonstrated.
Looking ahead, Microsoft plans to integrate this technology into its cloud computing services in the coming months, making it accessible to their global customer base.
While the benchmark for outperforming conventional supercomputers is around 100 reliable qubits, neither Microsoft nor Quantinuum specified how long it will take to reach this goal using their new technique. However, Ilyas Khan, Chief Product Officer of Quantinuum, optimistically noted, \"The current view is that we have lopped at least two years off that, if not more.\"
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Microsoft, Quantinuum claim breakthrough in quantum computing
cgtn.com
