The dilution refrigerator for the IBM Q quantum computer Graham Carlow/IBM
One of the biggest theoretical problems in quantum computing – just how much they differ from ordinary computers – has now been solved. The results suggest that these machines are far weirder than we thought.
“It’s a big deal because this has been one of the fundamental unsolved problems of quantum complexity theory for a quarter century,” says Scott Aaronson at the University of Texas at Austin.
Quantum computers are devices that solve problems using the weird rules of quantum physics. Unlike ordinary classical computers, which store information in bits…
