Researchers cast new doubt on Microsoft’s quantum computing advance
Microsoft’s controversial claim that its Majorana chip program will make possible a scalable quantum computer by 2029 has been thrown into new doubt by a scientific paper that questions whether the company has correctly interpreted its own experimental evidence. According to a peer-reviewed paper by Dr. Henry Legg from the University of St Andrews, published this week in Nature, Microsoft’s Topological Gap Protocol (TGP) framework, designed to infer the existence of quantum states in theorized Majorana particles, is flawed. “Last year Microsoft claimed they had built the equivalent of a precision Swiss watch. However, when I opened the case to examine the mechanism, I found what looked like a chaotic jumble of mismatched parts,” said Legg. He believed the results gathered from Microsoft’s TGP software data analysis could also be explained by other effects, as well as being skewed by the data chosen for analysis. Because of this, he believed the company’s researchers had jumped to the w