Google claims significant breakthrough in quantum chip "Willow": algorithm can be repeatedly verified, practical application may be achieved within five years

Google's Quantum division disclosed groundbreaking advancements in quantum computing related to the Willow chip in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The company's Willow quantum computing chip ran an algorithm that can be repeatedly executed on similar platforms, outperforming traditional supercomputers. Google stated that this breakthrough paves the way for practical applications of quantum technology within the next five years.

Google indicated that the algorithm, referred to as "Quantum Echoes," possesses "verifiability," meaning it can be repeatedly executed on another quantum computer. Google claimed that the algorithm runs 13,000 times faster than the world's most powerful supercomputer. According to Google, these results combined suggest that quantum computing will have broad potential applications in fields such as medicine and materials science.

Tom O'Brien, a research scientist at Google Quantum AI, stated:

"Verifiability is crucial; it's an important step towards real-world applications. Achieving this result means we are truly pushing quantum computing into the mainstream."

Media reports suggest that this breakthrough brings Google closer to realizing the promised powerful computing capabilities of quantum computing. Currently, Microsoft, IBM, and numerous startups are also actively catching up in this field. Just last December, Google announced that the "Willow" chip solved a problem in just five minutes, while the same problem would take 10 septillion years to complete using a supercomputer.

Quantum computers perform calculations through extremely small circuits, similar to traditional computers, but they can compute in parallel rather than sequentially, significantly increasing speed. Although many companies claim to have built quantum platforms that outperform traditional computers, their biggest challenge has always been finding truly useful application scenarios.

Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist not involved in the research, expressed to the media that he is "excited" about Google's progress, as they have made breakthroughs in "surpassing supercomputers in a repeatable manner," which means results can be efficiently verified on another quantum computer—one of the trickiest issues in the field over the past few years. However, he also cautioned that there is still a lot of work to be done.

"Transitioning from now to any commercially valuable application, or achieving scalable fault-tolerant computing (which this experiment did not use), remains a very challenging task."

Researchers demonstrated in another unpublished collaborative paper that one application of the algorithm is studying molecular structures by calculating the distances between atoms. This method could be used in drug development and materials science (e.g., battery design) in the future, but Google scientists estimate that to realize these applications, the scale of quantum computers must be 10,000 times larger than current machines.

The Google research team includes Michel H. Devoret, a 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Physics. The team stated that they plan to continue scaling up the machines and improving computational accuracy to advance quantum computing towards practical applications in the real world