"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.

The resulting applications include everything from cryptography and optimization to machine learning and materials science.

One of the biggest threats to privacy and national security is the ability of the immensely powerful quantum computers to break prevailing methods of encryption almost instantaneously. Once quantum computers become a reality, something that could conceivably happen in the next decade or two, all of the data protected by encrypted systems on the internet will become decrypted and unprotected, accessible to all individuals, organizations or nation-states. Dr. Jill Pipher, President of the American Mathematical Society, VP for Research, and Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University led a briefing last week for lawmakers on Capitol Hill called "No Longer Secure: Cryptography in the Quantum Era" about the threats that quantum computing poses to existing cryptographic systems that support national and economic security. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) began the briefing by saying "we're acutely aware of the potential advantages and disadvantages that quantum presents. And we're also very concerned that some of our adversaries and competitors are investing a great deal in quantum computing."

SAN FRANCISCO – Few corners of the tech industry are as tantalizing or complex as quantum computing. For years its evangelists have promised machines capable of breaking the most impenetrable coded messages, unlocking the secret properties of the physical world and putting supercomputers to shame. Right now, Rigetti's challenge for itself is this: Can it solve one, single problem with a quantum computer that a conventional machine cannot? Even if it just meant answering a question more quickly or cheaply than a supercomputer, the team of physicists and mathematicians at the startup's Berkeley, California, office would be overjoyed. Today, your laptop can solve pretty much everything one of the startup's quantum computers can do, just as quickly.