Quantum computing doesn't show up often in the news. After all, it has gigantic potential, but the technology has been promising practical real-world uses in "just a few years" for decades now. The science world may have finally reached a tipping point for practicality, though. Google's engineers demonstrated a world-first of running a verifiable algorithm on its Willow quantum chip — 13,000 times faster than a supercomputer.
The algorithm in question is called Quantum Echo and models a physics experiment in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR, the spectroscopic variant of the popular MRI), revealing internal molecular structures by detecting magnetic spins at the center of atoms. According to Google, Willow runs this 13,000x faster than "the best classic algorithm on the world's fastest supercomputers", meaning that the one chip is many order of magnitudes faster than an entire datacenter at this specific task.
