Microsoft announced a breakthrough in quantum computing | The Jerusalem Post

The keynote address at Microsoft’s developers conference was packed with speakers and announcements, led by the unveiling of wearable artificial intelligence developments called Project Solara, which we already covered here, but several other announcements also caught the eye.

It was actually at the end of the presentation that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped a bombshell of sorts, a la “One more thing” in the style of Steve Jobs: The company announced a new quantum processor called Majorana 2, whose main innovation is that the qubits, the basic units of information–similar to the zeros and ones in conventional computers–maintain stability for 20 seconds and even up to a minute. This might not sound like much, but it represents an insane leap in the stability of quantum processors–until today, qubits lasted for mere fractions of a second, making this a thousandfold improvement that paves the way for full-scale quantum computing within just a few years. Dr. Tomer Simon,…