摘要：TMTPOST -- Alphabet Inc. shares rose as much as 6.3% and settled 5.6% higher to $185.17 on Tuesday, their highest close since mid-

TMTPOST -- Alphabet Inc. shares rose as much as 6.3% and settled 5.6% higher to $185.17 on Tuesday, their highest close since mid-July. Shares advanced even though the U.S. stock market saw an all-around rough trading session ahead of CPI. The S&P 500 index finished 0.3% lower, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite fell 0.35% and 0.25%, respectively. Alphabet shares outperformed after the subsidiary Google announced it made quantum computing breakthrough with new chip dubbed Waymo.

Credit：Google

Willow, a major step on a journey that Google began over a decade ago, has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements, Hartmut Neven, head of Google Quantum AI, announced in a blog post on Monday. The first achievement is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as Google scales up using more qubits, cracking a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years, Neven said.

In a paper published in Nature on Moday, Google showed that the more qubits it uses in Willow, the more it reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes. Google researchers tested ever-larger arrays of physical qubits, scaling up from a grid of 3x3 encoded qubits, to a grid of 5x5, to a grid of 7x7 — and each time, using Google’s latest advances in quantum error correction, researchers were able to cut the error rate in half. In other words, they achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate. This historic accomplishment is known in the field as “below threshold” — being able to drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits. One must demonstrate being below threshold to show real progress on error correction, and this has been an outstanding challenge since quantum error correction was introduced by Peter Shor in 1995.

Another achievement is that Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe. On the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark, a standard now widely used in the field, Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. More exactly, if one wants to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

Google introduced Willow, a quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a post on X. The post went viral online and boosted enthusiasm of Wall Street. Alphabet shares extended their rally as analysts applauded the company’s breakthrough. Tesla CEO Elon Musk responeded Pichai’s post with a “Wow”, and talked about a quantum cluster in space with Starship developed by his SpaceX, an idea that Pichai proposed following his response. “That will probably happen,” Musk said in another post.”Any self-respecting civilization should at least reach Kardashev Type II. In my opinion, we are currently only at less than 5% of Type 1. To get to 30%, we would need to place solar panels in all desert or highly arid regions.” Pichai agreed his preference for solar energy, adding that people should scale solar much more, rather than constantly looking at alternatives.

"While we are years away from mainstream quantum computing, we believe Google’s announcement of Willow yesterday is an important step in the long path to make quantum useful for everyday applications," RW Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said in a note Tuesday, calling the announcement “a glimpse towards the horizon."

来源：钛媒体