Google announced on Monday that it had solved a complex quantum computing problem in five minutes using a new generation of chips, which would have taken a classical computer a longer time than the universe’s history.

Alphabet’s Google is pursuing quantum computing, like other corporate behemoths like Microsoft and International Business Machines (IBM), because it promises to achieve computer speeds that are significantly quicker than those of the most advanced systems available now. While there are currently no commercial applications for the arithmetic problem solved by the company’s Santa Barbara, California, quantum lab, Google expects that quantum computers can eventually solve issues in artificial intelligence, medicine, and battery chemistry that are beyond the capabilities of current computers.

A new chip named Willow, which has 105 “qubits,” the fundamental units of quantum computers, produced the findings that were made public on Monday. Despite their speed, qubits are prone to errors because they can be jostled by subatomic particles or events in space.

A semiconductor may become no more advanced than a standard computer chip when more qubits are crammed onto it. Scientists have been working on quantum error correction since the 1990s.

Google said in an article published Monday in the journal Nature that it has discovered a method to connect the qubits of the Willow chip in such a way that error rates decrease with increasing qubit count. Additionally, the business claims that it can instantly fix mistakes, which is a crucial step in making its quantum machines workable.

In an interview, Hartmut Neven, the head of Google’s Quantum AI division, stated, “We are past the break-even point.”

Using differing technical assumptions about a classical system, IBM contested Google’s claim in 2019 that its quantum processor solved a problem that would take a conventional computer 10,000 years, claiming that the problem could be solved in two and a half days.

Google says it considered some of those worries in its most recent projections in a blog post on Monday. Google claimed that a traditional computer would still require a billion years to achieve the same outcomes as its newest chip, even in the most optimistic circumstances.

In an interview, Anthony Megrant, principal architect for Google Quantum AI, stated that while some of Google’s competitors are manufacturing circuits with more qubits than Google, Google is concentrated on creating the most dependable qubits possible.

Prior to creating its own specialized fabrication facility to create its Willow chips, Google used a shared facility at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The new facility, according to Megrant, would increase the speed at which Google can produce future chips, which are kept cold in enormous freezers known as cryostats for experimental purposes.

“If we have a good idea, we want somebody on the team to be able to… get that into the clean room and into one of these cryostats as fast as possible, so we can get lots of cycles of learning,” Megrant explained.