This week, Microsoft unveiled Majorana 1, a chip that uses a new kind of quantum computing architecture. The company has been working for decades on this technology, which has the potential to revolutionize computing by quickly being able to solve problems that would take conventional computers years. Microsoft’s researchers published their findings in Nature.
If these results hold up, this chip could help solve one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing. That problem is that the connections between “quantum bits” or qubits for short, are extremely fragile, which leads to computational errors. These errors are typically corrected on the software level, but that slows the process down significantly.
Microsoft said that its new chip is based on what it calls a topological qubit, which was first theorized in the 1990s. In theory, connections between topological qubits are stronger on the physical level, meaning they produce fewer errors to correct (the tradeoff is that it makes quantum information harder to measure, which is why it’s taken decades to build one). Microsoft said in its announcement that with this success, the company will “realize quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.”
Quantum computing, if it pans out, will destroy Bitcoin and its mining industry.