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Glossary

Quantum glossary

Quantum advantage

Also: quantum supremacy, speedup

A quantum computer solving a task faster or better than any feasible classical method.

Demonstrations so far are on sampling tasks chosen for the purpose, and several have been narrowed by improved classical simulation. A useful advantage on a practical problem remains the field’s goal. Always ask: against which classical baseline?

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Related terms

  • NISQ — John Preskill’s name for today’s era: devices with tens to a few thousand noisy qubits and no full error correction.
  • Fault tolerance — Running a quantum computation reliably even though every physical component is faulty, by encoding in error-correcting codes.