Tag
#NISQ
3 articles
- State of Quantum Computing: Mid-2026 Edition
Five hardware platforms. Four NIST cryptographic standards. Two contested quantum advantage claims. One below-threshold error correction milestone. Seven years after the NISQ era began, quantum computing is at an inflection point. Here is a precise, unsentimental account of where every major platform stands, what has been proved, what remains unproven, and what the next decade realistically looks like.
- The Honest State of NISQ: What Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computers Can and Cannot Do
John Preskill coined 'NISQ' in 2018 to describe the quantum processors of the near-term era — 50 to 1000 noisy qubits, too small for error correction, too large to fully simulate classically. Seven years later, the honest accounting is clearer: NISQ has produced important scientific insights and genuine hardware progress, but no quantum advantage on a practically useful problem. Here is exactly why, and what the path forward looks like.
- QAOA and VQE: The Variational Algorithms That Define the NISQ Era
Before fault-tolerant quantum computers arrive, the algorithms most likely to demonstrate practical quantum advantage are variational: hybrid quantum-classical loops where a shallow quantum circuit estimates an objective function and a classical optimizer tunes the circuit parameters. VQE targets quantum chemistry; QAOA targets combinatorial optimization. Here is how both work, what they have achieved, and where the honest limits of the approach currently lie.
