Google’s Willow Computer Chip Is a Breakthrough In Quantum Computing [Video]

Google‘s latest project marks a major milestone in quantum computing.

On Monday, the corporation unveiled a new chip, dubbed Willow, that could prove pivotal to the development and potential large-scale use of the field. One of the new tech’s neatest tricks is that it needs just five minutes to solve a problem that would take the world’s most powerful supercomputers 10 septillion, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, years to complete, a report from Hartmut Neven, the founder and lead of Google’s Quantum AI division, says. That’s older than the universe, according to The New York Times.

For the unversed, quantum computing is rather different from the kind of tech that operates today’s laptops and smartphones, the BBC reports.Rather than processing information with every bit represented by either a 1 or 0, quantum computers use (rather fittingly) quantum mechanics, a field of physics that studies subatomic particles, to operate. …