The Ledger, every show

“The theorists have not worked out anything that a 64 qubit quantum computer can do that's super useful.”

“On the other hand, what we believe is about to happen in the coming year is that people will start to bring out qubits, ah, sorry quantum devices that are at or just a little bit over the quantum supremacy threshold. This number, a lot of people are racing to …”

“We are now getting on the verge of getting machines that will behave in ways that cannot be predicted, cannot be simulated. We'll be in the regime where we're genuinely discovering how the machine behaves by having one.”

“So now the threshold is about 99%. If you've got 90, if things work correctly in your quantum computer, 99% of the time, that's the turning point.”

“But 99.9, which is what the guys here in Oxford can do, is 10 times better than the threshold.”

“Especially something called the Kataev surface code, which is, at the moment, the go-to solution for how we would build a quantum computer.”

“But the one that I mentioned that we have the world record for the best control, is this thing called an ion trap, which sounds very technical.”

“So for the superconducting qubits that many researchers are excited, and we do do work on that here in Oxford as well the decay time, the amount of time that can go by before the wonderful zero one superposition just degrades, is the tiniest fraction of a seco…”

“Now, for the first quantum algorithms that we made, you know, the first serious ones that might do something useful, that perhaps we'll see in the coming year, ah, that's probably going to be the approach.”

“What we've worked out on paper is stuff that needs pretty big computers, and we don't know how long it would take to get there. You know, maybe, hopefully not decades, but it could take definitely more than a decade to get to the point where we have millions o…”

“Just in the last three years, we've had tons more interest from companies who come to us as academics and say, look, can we jointly work on something with you? I mean, that's really been a sea change.”

“And now the threshold when these results were first discovered in the nineties was about 10 parts per million. So I have a many nine, 99.9999 was the kind of level of precision that you would have to have in order to control your quantum computer and take the …”

“So that was responsible primarily for moving from the multiple nines to the 99% threshold.”

“Oxford is actually one of the biggest research facilities in the world for quantum. We've got something like 200 people working on this, and so we're working on a bunch of different stuff.”

“So, 45 qubits required 0.5. This wasn't my work. This was work elsewhere in the community. It required 0.5 half a petabyte of RAM, basically.”

“Breaking codes is in the category of things that needs at least thousands of qubits. But because it's a big, tough, long-running task, it also needs this whole error correction thing to be going on. And that boosts the size of it, because once you say, oh, wai…”

“Where we're at right now is that various labs around the world can give you 20 qubits. Ish. 10 to 20.”

“In fact, if you look online, you will hear more about the superconducting qubits, which is the approach, the main approach that Google and IBM and even Intel are taking.”