Recently IBM announced that it has integrated in its Quantum Computers an “Error Suppression” technology from Q-CTRL which can reduce even by orders of magnitude the likelihood of quantum errors when running an algorithm on a Quantum Computer (see for example here).

Quantum errors are inherent to Quantum Computing, and the likelihood of error usually grows with the number of qubits. Theoretical Quantum Error Correction Codes exist, but their practical implementation is not easy; for example, the simplest codes can require even a thousand error correction qubits for each computation qubit.

The approach by Q-CTRL seems to adopt a mixture of techniques to identify the more efficient and less quantum error-prone way of running a computation, for example by optimizing the distribution of quantum logical gates on the qubits and by monitoring quantum errors to design more efficient quantum circuits.

Surely it is an interesting approach, we’ll see how effective it will really turn out to be in reducing the likelihood of quantum errors.