A quantum computer just learned to catch its own mistakes — mid-calculation

Rutgers and IBM researchers, led by Jedediah Pixley and Maika Takita, have demonstrated real-time quantum error correction on a 156-qubit IBM Heron processor, running a connected chain of up to 100 qubits through about 5,000 entangling operations plus 5,000 checks and resets. As the checking rate rose, the system snapped from chaotic to controlled in a sharp phase transition — order emerging from chaos — a landmark toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, published in Nature Physics. The project began as a 2021 birthday-party bet, paid off in two scoops of blueberry ice cream.