As someone who has used Microsoft products, I'm just a tad skeptical that the super-woke company behind Teams, the Zune player, and the Xbox naming scheme has unlocked a "new state of matter," but hey, everyone loves a PR stunt, right?
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced an update to the physical constants of the universe:
Anyone who has sat through a third-grade science class knows there are three primary states of matter: solid, liquid and gas.
Microsoft now says it has created a new state of matter in its quest to make a powerful machine, called a quantum computer, that could accelerate the development of everything from batteries to medicines to artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, Microsoft's scientists said they had built what is known as a 'topological qubit' based on this new phase of physical existence, which could be harnessed to solve mathematical, scientific and technological problems.
Company CEO Satya Nadella hopped onto X yesterday to talk about the qubits:
After a nearly 20 year pursuit, we've created an entirely new state of matter, unlocked by a new class of materials, topoconductors, that enable a fundamental leap in computing.
It powers Majorana 1, the first quantum processing unit built on a topological core.
We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years.
If you're not familiar with quantum computing, it's the next generation of supercomputer science that promises to harness quantum physics to create machines capable of unbelievable feats of power.
As IBM puts it, "for a quantum computer, challenges that might take a classical computer thousands of years to complete might be reduced to a matter of minutes."
Part of the advantage lies in the use of qubits, or quantum bits. In contrast to standard binary bits, a qubit will "behave like a bit and store either a zero or a one, but it can also be a weighted combination of zero and one at the same time."
When combined, qubits in superposition can scale exponentially. Two qubits can compute with four pieces of information, three can compute with eight, and four can compute with sixteen.
If you want the sense of how big a factor that exponential property will be, consider that Nadella said the newly developed "topoconductors" will function with qubits at 1/100th of a millimeter, "meaning we now have a clear path to a million-qubit processor."
A million-qubit processor, scaled exponentially?
Clippy will be unstoppable!
As the CEO puts it: "Imagine a chip that can fit in the palm of your hand yet is capable of solving problems that even all the computers on Earth today combined could not!"
Hopefully it's not as buggy as Windows Vista!
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