To live up to the hype, quantum computers must repair their error problems
Astronaut John Glenn was wary about trusting a computer. It was 1962, early in the computer age, and a room-sized machine had calculated the flight path for his upcoming orbit of Earth — the first for an American. But Glenn wasn’t willing to entrust his life to a newfangled machine that might make a mistake. The astronaut requested that mathematician Katherine Johnson double-check the computer’s numbers, as recounted in the book Hidden Figures. “If she says they’re good,” Glenn reportedly said, “then I’m ready to go.” Johnson determined that the computer, an IBM 7090, was correct, and Glenn’s voyage became a celebrated milestone of spaceflight (SN: 3/3/62, p. 131). A computer that is even slightly error-prone can doom a calculation. Imagine a computer with 99 percent accuracy. Most of the time the computer tells you 1+1=2. But once every 100 calculations, it flubs: 1+1=3. Now, multiply that error rate by the billions or...