The firm reported about 99.99% fidelity, a measure of how closely the finished states matched what researchers were aiming for.
That number applies only to the states that passed inspection. Willow kept about 8% of its attempts after the checks during preparation and measurement. For every 100 tries, about eight made it through.
The next steps include running the process at a much larger scale and keeping those states useful as they feed into longer calculations. The researchers say more work is needed on real-time operations and moving the states into stronger error-correcting setups.
How it fits with earlier research
In March, Google estimated that a future superconducting quantum computer with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits could break the wallet cryptography used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, under a specific set of hardware assumptions.
In September, CoinDesk reported on researchers cutting the workload of a core calculation used in…
