Google has made a breakthrough in quantum computing, and its "magic cultivation" technology has reduced the error rate of Willow chips by about 40 times

IT House News on October 16, On October 15, local time, Google announced that its quantum artificial intelligence team had experimentally confirmed and overcome a core bottleneck of quantum computing: it successfully verified the practical feasibility of a technology called "Magic State Cultivation" on the Willow quantum chip, reducing the quantum computing error rate by about 40 times compared with not using this technology. Relevant research results have been published in the journal Science. According to reports, to achieve "universal quantum computing" and run actual programs, the system must be able to perform a specific set of quantum operations and complete quantum error correction. This goal can be achieved by pre-preparing so-called "Magic States"; they are named because they help build core operations that exceed the limits of classical computing. However, preparing high-quality and error-corrected magic states consumes computing resources. According to some estimates, up to 95% of a quantum computer’s entire computing capacity may have to be dedicated to preparing magic states, leaving very little resources for actual calculations. What's even more troublesome is that the magic state is a one-time consumption of resources and cannot be reused after use, which makes it extremely scarce. IT House learned that in 2024, Google quantum artificial intelligence researchers Craig Gidney, Noah Shutty and Cody Jones drew on ideas from academic literature and deepened them, creating a new method now known as "magic state cultivation." This solution shows great potential to significantly reduce resource overhead. The core mechanism is like a quantum filter: a noisy quantum state is first injected into a tiny area of ​​the quantum chip, and then a series of highly coordinated measurements are performed to detect system errors and eliminate defective attempts. Craig and his team demonstrated that this process can be used to "grow" quantum states with extremely high purity and low error rates, while also adaptively adapting them to larger scales of usable quantum encodings. Relying on the above progress and numerous algorithm innovations and engineering optimizations, Google has refreshed