Google’s research on quantum error correction

Quantum computers have the potential to revolutionize drug discovery, material design and fundamental physics — that is, if we can get them to work reliably.

Certain problems, which would take a conventional computer billions of years to solve, would take a quantum computer just hours. However, these new processors are more prone to noise than conventional ones. If we want to make quantum computers more reliable, especially at scale, we need to accurately identify and correct these errors.

In a paper published today in Nature, we introduce AlphaQubit, an AI-based decoder that identifies quantum computing errors with state-of-the-art accuracy. This collaborative work brought together Google DeepMind’s machine learning knowledge and Google Quantum AI’s error correction expertise to accelerate progress on building a reliable quantum computer.

Accurately identifying errors is a critical step towards making quantum computers capable of performing long computations at scale, opening the doors to scientific breakthroughs and many new areas of discovery.