Conclusion

We have so far been focusing on industrial applications of quantum computing in all our interviews. We have touched upon applications in financial services, healthcare, smart cities, and even politics. The interview with Sam had a different focus, and that was deliberate. I wanted to focus on one of the key barriers for quantum computing going mainstream – high error rates.

We discussed why error correction in a quantum computer is harder than in a classical computer. The superposition property of qubits makes it harder for us to capture their states. When we observe qubits, their states collapse. These properties of quantum computers make them useful in solving complex algorithms and make information on quantum computers more secure. However, they also make error correction harder as we cannot observe or copy over the information easily.

We touched upon techniques like using shorter circuits and using certain code for certain algorithms and NISQ...