Quantum computing gets real: It could even shorten your airport connection

One day, you might avoid a missed flight connection because of the weird ability of very small particles to act as though they are in two places at once. That critical point lies somewhere between 50 and 100 qubits, says Travis Humble, director of the Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. A milestone came in June of last year when IBM published a study in Nature showing its 127-qubit processor’s ability to beat conventional computers at certain calculations related to magnetic materials. Jansen, of Germany’s DESY, says he has successfully solved small versions of the flight-gate optimization problem on a trapped-ion quantum computer made by IonQ and has glimpsed early hints that his technique, at large enough qubit counts, might outperform conventional computing methods. Using a similar approach to Jansen’s, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic say an IBM quantum computer bested a state-of-the-art artificial-intelligence algorithm at predicting the shape of a section of a protein molecule from knowledge of its amino acids—a task that could be useful for detecting and treating certain diseases as the capabilities of quantum computers evolve. Trial-and-error approaches could certainly uncover new uses for quantum computers, says Scott Aaronson, director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin.