'Mind-boggling': how big a breakthrough is Google's latest quantum computing success?

Google has unveiled a powerful new quantum computer chip that it says takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to complete – more time than the universe has existed.

Willow is the latest development in quantum computing, a field that is "attempting to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of mind-bogglingly powerful computer", said the BBC. Google says the chip represents a major breakthrough and could soon pave the way to "a useful, large-scale quantum computer".

Quantum computing is still an experimental field. But Google's achievement shows that scientists are refining techniques and technologies that could one day allow the discipline to "live up to the enormous expectations that have surrounded this big idea for decades", said The New York Times.

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What did the commentators say?

Since Google unveiled Willow, there has been some "breathless reporting about it", but what the chip represents "is not so simple", said Engadget.

Google used a benchmark test called random circuit sampling (RCS) to prove that Willow could perform these calculations much faster than a classical computer. But RCS, designed only to test quantum computing, has, in the words of Google itself, "no known real-world applications".

But the Google team have "another reason to believe in Willow's bright future", said New Scientist. "The propensity of quantum computers to make errors is one of the biggest issues currently preventing them from delivering on the promise of being more powerful than any other type of computer." But Google's study, published in Nature, showed that for the first time, errors can be suppressed exponentially as a quantum computer increases in size – a breakthrough that has been pursued in the field for more than 30 years.

Surpassing this "error correction threshold" means that quantum computers "are on a path to a moment, still well into the future, when they can overcome their mistakes and perform calculations" that could significantly accelerate scientific progress, as well as perform tasks that businesses and consumers find useful, said The New York Times.

"What we really want these machines to do is run applications that people really care about," said John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. "Though it still might be decades away, we will eventually see the impact of quantum computing on our everyday lives."

What next?

Microsoft, Amazon and IBM are all working on quantum computing systems of their own.

Scientists believe that this technology will one day be able to "make major breakthroughs in materials sciences and biology by conducting massive calculations at the molecular and atomic level that would be impractical for classical computers to tackle", said Semafor.

Google's next challenge will be to "perform a first 'useful, beyond-classical' computation that is both 'relevant to a real-world application' and one that typical computers can't achieve", said The Verge.