The company announced an impressive 99.99% fidelity rate, indicating how closely the resulting states aligned with the researchers’ objectives.
This statistic pertains solely to the states that successfully passed inspection. Willow retained around 8% of its trials after conducting checks during preparation and measurement. Essentially, for every 100 attempts, approximately eight met the criteria.
Future endeavors involve scaling up the process considerably while ensuring the states remain functional as they integrate into extended calculations. Researchers emphasize that additional efforts are necessary for real-time operations and transferring the states into more robust error-correcting frameworks.
Relation to Previous Research
In March, Google proposed that a future superconducting quantum computer featuring fewer than 500,000 physical qubits could potentially break the cryptographic security used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, given specific hardware conditions.
In September, CoinDesk reported on researchers who significantly reduced the computational workload of a key calculation involved in that theoretical attack. This work focused on one aspect, excluding the complete attack framework and the hardware costs needed to execute it.
The studies aim to minimize the mathematical burden on attackers, while the cultivation aspect addresses the expenses related to maintaining the machinery during these calculations.
However, these benefits cannot simply be combined. Google’s March projection already accounted for efficient magic-state generation. This experiment investigates a part of that engineering strategy rather than yielding an additional 40-fold decrease in the predicted cost associated with attacking Bitcoin.