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Hartmut Neven, the founder and lead at Google Quantum AI, says Google's new Willow quantum chip is so fast it may be borrowing computational power from other universes in the multiverse. (blog.google)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Lugh@futurology.today to c/futurology@futurology.today

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Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want 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.

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[–] bob_lemon@feddit.org 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

That's not what it means at all.

This is like saying rockets borrow velocity from other universes because they can reach the moon in a few hours, whereas a car cannot.

It's well known that current day cryptography relies on operations that are really calculation-intensive on regular binary computing systems. That's what it is designed for. It is also well-known that quantum computers can get around this complexity (although I honestly don't understand how).