"800 times better"

Microsoft reports progress with quantum computers

Thanks to a new method, the quantum computer's susceptibility to errors should be significantly lower.(Bild: Quantinuum)

According to Microsoft, together with its partner Quantinuum, it has made leaps and bounds towards commercially viable quantum computers. A new method of error correction has significantly increased reliability, the Microsoft manager responsible, Jason Zander, told Reuters news agency on Wednesday.

"We have run more than 14,000 individual experiments without a single error. That's up to 800 times better than anything we've done before." The Chief Product Officer of Quantinuum, Ilyas Khan, spoke of "at least two years" that had been saved in getting to a commercially viable machine. He did not say how many more years it would take in total.

Microsoft wants to make the currently available quantum technology accessible to its cloud customers in the coming months. Several other tech giants such as Google and IBM are also working on their own machines.

An infinite number of states
Quantum computers use the physical laws of the quantum world for their calculations. Conventional computers work with bits that only know the states zero or one. Quantum computers, on the other hand, use qubits, which can theoretically assume an infinite number of intermediate states. This should enable certain calculations to be carried out millions of times faster than with conventional computers.

However, qubits are prone to errors, which is a central problem in the construction of quantum computers. This is currently being solved by combining several "physical" qubits into "reliable" qubits. According to Microsoft, it has now applied a new algorithm for error correction that allows a ratio of four reliable qubits to 30 physical qubits.

Researchers at Quantinuum and rivals often cite 100 reliable qubits as the threshold above which a quantum computer should be able to outperform a conventional computer.