Marjoram of my youth

Less than two years ago, we were amazed by the progress of the company OpenAI in the field artificial intelligence heralding revolutionary changes in our lives. Last week Microsoft set out to surpass that many times over by announcing that not only had they built their first quantum chip and called it Majorana 1, but that the chip was operating in an aggregate state that had until now only been known to theoretical physicists. If it turns out that only a fraction of what Microsoft announces is true, the IT world as we know it today will seem extremely primitive to us, as if we were to compare today's computers with typewriters or abacus.

First, an extremely superficial insight into quantum computers. The computers we use today are binary, they convert everything into a series of zeros and ones to solve the tasks we put in front of them. They use transistor chips that are getting faster and more powerful from generation to generation and that's how we got artificial intelligence, 3D animation and other amazing wonders. But there are physical limitations to the development of such chips.

That is why the development of quantum computers, which work with qubits instead of bits, began. If with binary computers everything is black and white, then for quantum computers we can say that they introduce us to color and in all possible shades. This means much higher speeds, almost unimaginable. Google's Willow chip does in five minutes what the fastest binary chip takes ten septillion years, which is considered the time since the creation of the universe to the present day. A septillion is a number with a one on the left end followed by 42 zeros. Microsoft claims that the Majorana chip is even faster, but these are superlatives of the scientific teams of two powerful companies, completely unverifiable to us outside of that world.

This chip was named after the physicist Ettore Majorana, who predicted an unusual particle that is also its own antiparticle, something like a reflection in a mirror. Such a particle exists in a topological state that is new compared to the solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma aggregate state. At Microsoft, they developed a superconductor in which qubits can function without problems, since they are otherwise very sensitive to "noise" in the environment, and that was the biggest problem in the practical development of quantum computers. All this is described in an article in the new issue of Nature magazine.

Microsoft scientists are very careful when they talk about a superpower chip whose processing power is greater than all existing chips in the world combined. They believe that they are just at the beginning and that the first versions will probably have their flaws, but that in a few years they will get a stable chip that will really be able to create miracles.

And under miracles is considered the possibility of simulating natural processes. This means that scientists would no longer need laboratories to test theories, the Majorana chip would do all the research in seconds. Using it and chips from other companies, we are expected to push the boundaries in drug research or efficient batteries.

Its effect in the creative industries would be practically unlimited. He will be able to make a complete projection of any location in the world and insert the avatars of the actors into it, so filming movies or series will be reduced to writing scripts and recording books. And the computer will be able to do that too with a little prompting from us.

We should not panic or get overly excited just yet, the power of such a chip is limited by our ability to use it. And what we have now is too much for most.