Amazon has become the third tech giant in as many months to announce a breakthrough in quantum computing – a technology that promises vast processing power but is beset by technical difficulties. The firm has unveiled Ocelot, a prototype chip built on “cat qubit” technology – an approach that derives its name from the famous “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment. The chip seeks to address one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the development of quantum computers – making them error-free. Amazon says, taken alongside other recent breakthroughs in the industry, its work means useful quantum computers are likely to be with us sooner than previously thought. But how quickly these machines will be powerful enough to be practically useful for a range of commercial applications is a matter of debate among experts. Oskar Painter of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology, where the work was carried out, told the BBC that recent progress meant an “aggressive date” of a decade was now “looking more and more realistic”.
Amazon believes the new chip offers a path to scaling up to more powerful machines with this type of error-proofing built in, but researchers admit there are many challenges ahead. The technology of cat qubits isn’t exclusive to Amazon, a French company named Alice & Bob carried out pioneering work on the tech and continues to evolve the technology. Amazon believes the new chip reduces the costs of correcting quantum errors by up to 90%, compared to current approaches.
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