After many years of work, Microsoft has unveiled its first quantum hardware, the Majorana 1 processor. Let's grok its topoconductor and tetron-based qubits.

There's a race going on. Not the one to build artificial general intelligence, whatever that may be, but to deliver the first at-scale quantum computer that's able to solve a class of massive problems that would take far too long using even the most powerful supercomputer.

Building a quantum computer requires devices that can work at temperatures close to absolute zero, where it's possible to set, observe, and measure the quantum states of subatomic particles and use those measurements as part of a complex analog computer. More importantly, we need a way to ensure that there are no errors in those measurements and that the probabilities associated with them aren't affected by how we measure them or by fluctuations in temperature and charge. Then we need tools to build and run the complex quantum circuits used to model problems, going from code to physics and back again, from our high-temperature world to one colder than interstellar space.

It's enough to make rocket scientists think they have an easy job.