Quantum computing is expected to leave classical computing in the dust when it comes to solving some of the world’s most fiendishly difficult problems. The best quantum machines today have one major weakness, however — they are incredibly error-prone.
That’s why the field is racing to develop and implement quantum error-correction (QEC) schemes to alleviate the technology’s inherent unreliability. These approaches involve building redundancies into the way that information is encoded in the qubits of quantum computers, so that if a few errors creep into calculations, the entire computation isn't derailed. Without any additional error correction, the error rate in qubits is roughly 1 in 1,000 versus 1 in 1 million million in classical computing bits.
