

In a publication in today's Nature, IBM researchers make a strong case for the answer to that being yes. Given that we probably won't reach that point until the next decade at the earliest, it raises the question of whether quantum computers can do anything interesting in the meantime. But these will require multiple high-quality qubits for every bit of information, meaning we'll need thousands of qubits that are better than anything we can currently make. Long term, the plan is to solve that using error-corrected qubits. If we try an operation that needs a lot of qubits, or a lot of operations on a smaller number of qubits, then errors become inevitable. While the probabilities are small-less than 1 percent in many cases-each operation we perform on each qubit, including basic things like reading its state, has a significant error rate. Today's quantum processors are error-prone.
