A fascinating idea about how to use multiple unreliable 1st generation quantum computers to produce a full-scale quantum computer appears in this issue of Nature. The NIST press release nicely sums up its significance:
Use of Knill's architecture could lead to reliable computing even if individual logic operations made errors as often as 3 percent of the time—performance levels already achieved in NIST laboratories with qubits based on ions (charged atoms). The proposed architecture could tolerate several hundred times more errors than scientists had generally thought acceptable.
Unfortunately at this stage it's just that: a concept: No experimental evidence or theoretical proof has been given to demonstrate this can actually work in practice. But the thought of using a collective of independent solutions to produce a more exact estimate of the unknown solution would certainly bring a surge of delight to any statistician. In fact, I would guess this paper could very well get a whole army of statistically-trained scientists working in the area of statistical estimation and related areas excited enough to take the core ideas (e.g. bagging) from some of their previously published papers and port them over to quantum computing.
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