Communications of the ACM
Tales of Topological Qubits
Credit: PixelProphet
Quantum computers are scaling up quickly. Manufacturers expect to break the thousand-qubit barrier by 2024, with a plan to reach one million in the next decade. Despite these advances, the technology faces an enormous problem. To handle real-world applications, each qubit needs to be able to pass through numerous logic operations before its delicate state collapses. However, the qubits in today's technologies are too unstable for this to happen without extensive error correction.
The error-correction techniques in use today forge virtual qubits from 20 or more physical qubits to provide sufficient stability. Even then, they can only perform simple operations before the errors build up too far. Though the mainstream plan is to try to find ways to better stabilize the qubits to provide more headroom for the error correction, there is another possibility. That is to use a different technology that can harness inherent quantum effects to build a much greater degree of fault tolerance into the machine.
Comments
Ian Joyner
Excellent article on quantum computing. I like the title -- it could be the Revealing Science of God.
I'm sure the author will understand this comment.
For others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_Topographic_Oceans
Displaying 1 comment