A Sobering Reminder of Where We Currently Stand

…[R]eluctance to accept that practical quantum computing has arrived presumably stems from the question of whether it can do anything truly useful yet. Sure, one can construct a problem that is very hard for a classical device but ideally suited to a quantum computer and then demonstrate that only a few dozen qubits may be enough to achieve ‘supremacy’. But how helpful is that in the proverbial real world?

…One of the key problems is noise: current qubits are error-prone, and there are not yet ways of correcting such quantum errors. So if the calculation has too many logical steps, the noise overwhelms the result, producing gibberish… 

…It’s a sobering reminder of where we currently stand. Sure, things will continue to improve…

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