For as long as we’ve been building computers, it feels like we’ve been speaking the same language — the language of bits. Think of bits as tiny switches, each stubbornly stuck in either an ‘on’ or ‘off’ position, representing the 1s and 0s that underpin everything digital. And for decades, refining these switches, making them smaller and faster, has been the name of the game. We’ve ridden the wave of Moore’s Law, achieving incredible feats of computation with this binary system. But what if, perhaps, we’ve been looking at computation in just black and white, when a whole spectrum of possibilities exists?

Bravyi, Dial, Gambetta, Gil, and Nazario from IBM Quantum in “The Future of Quantum Computing with Superconducting Qubits” say.

For the first time in history, we are seeing a branching point in computing paradigms with the emergence of quantum processing units (QPUs).