DevOps / SRE / Platform · 30.07.2026, 10:18 UTC
IBM says quantum computers are getting harder to verify. That’s progress.
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | DevOps / SRE / Platform |
| Quelle | The New Stack ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 30.07.2026 UTC |
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IBM and its partners say quantum computers are now getting to the point where they can run calculations that can’t be reproduced and verified by using classical methods on today’s computers.
While that’s definitely a sign of progress given that useful quantum computers always seem five years away, we are also now getting to the point where we need new ways to check that the quantum computer actually got to the right answer.
A result nobody can verify isn’t all that useful, after all.
As a group of researchers from IBM and the University of Chicago note in one of three papers IBM published with a group of partners on Thursday, to trust that quantum computers can “achieve an exponential runtime separation over classical computation for certain tasks,” we need to trust the results.
“Beyond a complexity-theoretic foundation, […] a scalable demonstration of quantum advantage must satisfy two further criteria,” the researchers write. “First, increasing circuit size must be matched with a corresponding suppression of noise, such that the experiment evades classical simulation as it scales [13]. Second, one must be able to trust that these complex calculations were performed with high fidelity, even in the presence of noise.”
IBM and its partners have announced that they found new ways to build confidence in these results. The researchers describe calculations that went beyond the leading classical methods they tested, while still giving them ways to assess the results.
While IBM and the University of Chicago led the research, it was supported in various aspects by Qedma, …