Con­ven­tion­al com­put­ers would not have suf­fi­cient mem­o­ry to achieve such a feat.
The quan­tum cir­cuit gen­er­ates high­ly entan­gled quan­tum states that the researchers then used to pro­gram the 2D Ising mod­el by per­form­ing a sequence of oper­a­tions on the qubits and pairs of qubits. Although this method elim­i­nates much of the noise, errors remained. The researchers there­fore applied a quan­tum error mit­i­ga­tion process using con­ven­tion­al com­put­er soft­ware. The tech­nique works thanks to the 127-qubit proces­sor’s abil­i­ty to encode many con­fig­u­ra­tions of the Ising mod­el. Con­ven­tion­al com­put­ers would not have suf­fi­cient mem­o­ry to achieve such a feat.