A Crucial Threshold.

A potential revolution in global manufacturing.

“It’s the first thing I read every day.” — Brigadier General (retired) Russ Howard, founding director of The Combating Terrorism Center at The United States Military Acaademy.

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1. Researchers at Google have built a chip that has enabled them to demonstrate the first ‘below threshold’ quantum calculations — a key milestone in the quest to build quantum computers that are accurate enough to be useful. The experiment, described on 9 December in Nature, shows that with the right error-correction techniques, quantum computers can perform calculations with increasing accuracy as they are scaled up — with the rate of this improvement exceeding a crucial threshold. Current quantum computers are too small and too error-prone for most commercial or scientific applications. “This has been a goal for 30 years,” said Michael Newman, a research scientist at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, at a press conference announcing the feat. The achievement means that by the end of the decade, quantum computers could enable scientific discoveries that are impossible even with the most powerful supercomputers imaginable, said Charina Chou, the chief operating officer of Google’s quantum-computing arm. “That’s the reason we’re building these things in the first place,” Newman added. (Google Quantum AI and Collaborators research paper is here. Source: nature.com)

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