See the original article here: To live up to the hype, quantum computers must repair their error problems

Physicists try to construct ways to find and correct errors in quantum computers without wrecking the data. Astronaut John Glenn was wary about trusting a computer. It was 1962, early in the computer age, and a room-sized machine had calculated the flight path for his upcoming orbit of Earth — the first for an American. But Glenn wasn’t willing to entrust his life to a newfangled machine that might make a mistake. The astronaut requested that mathematician Katherine Johnson double-check the computer’s numbers, as recounted in the book Hidden Figures . “If she says they’re good,” Glenn reportedly said, […]

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