Microsoft's wacky Majorana 1 chip, powered by an 'entirely new state of matter', could have industrial quantum computing here 'in years, not decades'
Yes, the scientists are doing weird stuff again, and this weird stuff is sure to lead to other weird stuff and plenty of even more peculiar technology in the future. At least, that's usually my reading of anything quantum computing related, and that seems to be the general gist of Microsoft's new quantum chip announcement.
Microsoft says the new chip, the Microsoft Majorana 1, is «the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture» that it expects will «realize quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.
»It leverages the world’s first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers."
In other words, Microsoft is claiming that this chip could bring us into the quantum computing age much quicker than people were expecting. And the quantum computing age should mean computing certain things orders of magnitude faster, with less energy expense, than in today's classical computing age.
Quantum computers use qubits rather than regular bits to represent information. These qubits can hold a state that is in some ways both 0 and 1 (in 'superposition'), or rather a little of column A and a little of column B. Another way of thinking about it is to say that a qubit can represent a probability that's either closer to 1 or to 0, and when it's measured its state 'collapses' to a nice whole number, a 1 or a 0.
This allows you to perform calculations probabilistically and then get a definite result when you measure it. It also allows you to explore multiple different calculations simultaneously to find the fastest route (the «correct» answer), which is where the real fun lies for its practical applications. (We'll set aside the fact that thinking of these calculations as actually happening simultaneously is apparently just a convenient but non-literal way of
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