Natural Sciences Active Updated Jul 29, 2026

Can quantum computers actually beat regular computers yet?

The quantum advantage race

Where it stands as of Sep 4, 2026

Classical hardware keeps catching up. Joseph Tindall and Miles Stoudenmire at the Flatiron Institute used tensor networks to reproduce on a personal laptop results a team had claimed required a quantum computer to model. On the hardware side, a group in Austria and Munich entangled two distant qubits automatically using a shared low-energy microwave bath, tested across about 20 inches of cable. Whether that entanglement holds at any useful distance is untested.

Physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and the Technical University of Munich entangled qubits automatically by exposing them to a shared bath of low-energy microwaves, replacing finicky single-photon methods. The stakes are whether this low-maintenance entanglement can scale to the arbitrary distances needed for real quantum computers.

The story so far

Jul 29, 2026 Latest

A team at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and the Technical University of Munich confirmed a 20-year-old theory by entangling two distant qubits automatically using a shared low-energy microwave bath, with no active photon-matching required, testing it across about 20 inches of cable.

Today Got Better
Jul 21, 2026

Joseph Tindall and Miles Stoudenmire of the Simons Foundation's Flatiron Institute used tensor networks, a technique for compressing complex quantum wave functions, to reproduce on classical hardware, including a personal laptop, results a team had claimed required a quantum computer to model hundreds of entangled qubits, matching both the theoretical predictions and the quantum computer's own output.

Today Got Better

The story so far

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