IonQ Unveils World's Most Powerful Quantum Computer

"Demonstrating the first successful quantum logic gate in 1995 was almost an accident, but doing so opened a path forward towards deploying quantum computers on previously unsolvable problems," said IonQ Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Chris Monroe. "The new system we're deploying today is able to do things no other quantum computer has been able to achieve, and even more importantly, we know how to continue making these systems much more powerful moving forward." One way is to fix errors through circuit encoding, capitalizing on a recent demonstration of quantum error correction in a nearly identical system. Monroe says "with our new IonQ system, we expect to be able to encode multiple qubits to tolerate errors, the holy grail for scaling quantum computers in the long haul." This encoding requires just 13 qubits to make a near-perfect logical qubit, while in other hardware architectures it's estimated to take more than 100,000.