It has been a good week for quantum computing. Scientists in Australia announced that they have successfully built a single atom transistor, and researchers writing in Nature, have demonstrated an error correction technique that could make quantum computers more reliable.
Quantum computers, while powerful, are prone to significant errors. While a classical computer given the same input will get the same result time after time, a quantum computer will not. The output of any calculation on a quantum computer (even one with just eight qubits) is probabilistic, rather than certain.
The research, a result of collaboration between the Universities of Melbourne, British Columbia and the National Laboratory for Physical Sciences in China, is an experimental demonstration of topological error correction on an eight photon cluster state.
The researchers say the technique can protect against a single error on a qubit, and reduce the overall sensitivity to errors.