Two new advances toward building the first practical quantum computer

phys.org

27 pointsandrelaszlo2 comments

"square quantum bit circuit design that is the only physical architecture that could successfully scale to larger dimensions"

There's really only one way to to possibly do things?

No, there's not only one way. Also, IBM did not invent/discover the layout in question (I think?). The article does tone it down later on, at least:

> IBM's design shows the best potential to scale by adding more qubits to arrive at a working quantum system

The surface code [0] is a good bet in the which-layout-will-work-first race. Mostly because the existing manufacturing capabilities are limited to working on a surface (as opposed to in 3d), and because the surface code has a good threshold error rate (~1%).

John Martinis talked about the surface code in a google tech talk [1].

0: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.0928.pdf

1: https://youtu.be/HQmFEt6l6Tw?t=21m24s

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