Lately, it seems as though the path to quantum computing has more milestones than there are miles. Judging by headlines, each week holds another big announcement—an advance in qubit size, or another record-breaking investment. This is Q&A with the former chief architect of Google’s Sycamore, John MartinisBy Dan Garisto.
But if you go back to one of the points of the quantum supremacy experiment—and something I’ve been talking about for a few years now—one of the key requirements is gate errors. I think gate errors are way more important than the number of qubits at this time. It’s nice to show that you can make a lot of qubits, but if you don’t make them well enough, it’s less clear what the advance is. In the long run, if you want to do a complex quantum computation, say with error correction, you need way below 1% gate errors.
I want to drill down on “scale versus quality,” because I think it’s sort of easy for people to understand that 127 qubits is more qubits.
It depends how you want to quantify it, but it’s not a huge factor. It could be a bit better if you had more qubits, but you would maybe have to architect it in a different way. I don’t think it is good for the field to oversell results making people think that you’re almost there. It’s progress, and that’s great, but there still is a long way to go.
Very interesting read! Seems, like we are still some time away from good quantum system.
[Read More]