(In addition to a standard surface code, Google includes a few qubits that handle a phenomenon called “leakage,” where a qubit ends up in a higher-energy state, instead of the two low-energy states defined as zero and one.) The key result is that going from a distance of three to a distance of five more […]
December 9, 2024 | Computer science, Google, logical qubits, Physics, quantum computing, quantum error correction, quantum mechanics, Science | No comments
By some measures, AI systems are now competitive with traditional computing methods for generating weather forecasts. Because their training penalizes errors, however, the forecasts tend to get “blurry”—as you move further ahead in time, the models make fewer specific predictions since those are more likely to be wrong. As a result, you start to see […]
December 4, 2024 | AI, atmospheric science, Computer science, Earth science, meteorology, Science, weather forecasting | No comments
One year ago, I didn’t know how to bake bread. I just knew how to follow a recipe. If everything went perfectly, I could turn out something plain but palatable. But should anything change—temperature, timing, flour, Mercury being in Scorpio—I’d turn out a partly poofy pancake. I presented my partly poofy pancakes to people, and […]
November 28, 2024 | algorithms, baking, bread, Computer science, Culture, Features, frameworks, sourdough, tiktok, YouTube | No comments
We’re nearing the end of the year, and there are typically a flood of announcements regarding quantum computers around now, in part because some companies want to live up to promised schedules. Most of these involve evolutionary improvements on previous generations of hardware. But this year, we have something new: the first company to market […]
November 20, 2024 | Computer science, dual-rail qubits, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, qubits, Science | No comments