Megaquop, The Complete Guide To Quantum Computing's Next Milestone

Quantum computing spent seven years being described by a word that named what its machines could not do. NISQ meant noisy and uncorrected, and it was always meant to expire. The word proposed to replace it is megaquop, and it names a machine by what it can finish rather than by what it lacks.

A megaquop machine runs about a million quantum operations reliably. That is a smaller claim than most coverage of quantum computing makes, and it is a great deal harder than anything built so far. This guide sets out where the term came from, what the specification says, and the three things that have to keep working before one exists.

The unit is quantum operations completed reliably, and Preskill was explicit that mega means roughly a million rather than exactly one.

The specification is concrete. One error in a million per logical gate, about a hundred logical qubits, circuits about ten thousand layers deep.

The gap to today is three to four orders of magnitude. Physical two-qubit gates are wrong about once in three hundred on Willow, and error correction rather than better gates is what closes it.

It would not break encryption. RSA-2048 is a gigaquop problem, a thousand times further up the scale.