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TechnologyScience

Google's Willow chip

A quantum processor gets more accurate as it gets bigger, crossing the error-correction threshold.

When
Known to
± 12 hours
Era
Contemporary, Holocene

Announced 9 December 2024, Willow was the first quantum processor to show that adding physical qubits could reduce the logical error rate — the below-threshold result error correction had promised since the 1990s. Google also ran a benchmark it said would take a classical supercomputer longer than the age of the universe, a claim contested as it had been in 2019.

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