However, we still may face significant hurdles before a general purpose quantum computer is available to tackle, for instance, really large scale factorization into prime numbers or computational tasks, optimization problems excluded.
Progress in quantum computing and the broader area of quantum technologies has been quite remarkable. However, we still may face significant hurdles before a general purpose quantum computer is available to tackle, for instance, really large scale factorization into prime numbers or computational tasks, optimization problems excluded. The challenge is that a quantum computer must do its computation, the superposition that allows for the computational advantage breaks down, a process called decoherence.11 The more qubits used, the more susceptible to noise the superposition becomes. This is why real-world quantum computers have been so hard to build.