GOOGLE IS ONE STEP CLOSER TO A FAULT TOLERANT QUANTUM COMPUTER Every useful quantum computer needs a supply of something called magic states. They’re the ingredient that lets a machine run real algorithms instead of simple ones, they can’t be reused, and making them is so expensive that some estimates say 95% of a future quantum computer’s capacity would go to manufacturing them. That’s been the quiet bottleneck behind every roadmap in the industry. Today Google published a paper in Science showing a new way to make them on its Willow chip. Instead of building a magic state from scratch at huge cost, you start with a rough one, grow it inside a small protected patch of the chip, measure it over and over, throw away every attempt that shows an error, and keep the survivors. They call it cultivation. The numbers were a 40-fold cut in errors versus the raw state, and the highest-fidelity magic state ever produced on hardware, 99.99%. They also showed the grown state can be transplanted from one type of error correcting code into another, which is the plumbing a real machine needs. Google’s own caveat is that it has to work at much larger scale before it counts for practical computing. Fair, but the bottleneck everyone assumed would be the expensive part just got a lot cheaper, on a chip that exists. $INFQ $IONQ $QNT $GOOGL