In my scientific paper, I will present three different methods of experimentally proving something that is both purportedly impossible yet theoretically possible. Basically, it depends who you ask.

Method 1 is not intended to work. It represents the simplest possible way the solution could possibly be found. And, after struggling with it for a while, I have it working. Sort of.

Quantum computing is still in its infancy. Accuracy is an issue. But, if I could add just a little error correction and fault tolerance, Method 1 suddenly looks plausible.

The change from my previous blog post, in which I stated that I couldn’t get it to work, is that I was only running the experiment on a simulator. After a few days, I began to wonder if there would be any difference on real hardware.

There is!

On a simulator, the experiment seems to fall apart. There is no way to even pretend that it is working. On real hardware, however, I actually see the correct result. There is a significant error rate, but the proof-òf-concept is there.

I had learned the hard way to always run on a simulator first, because you can waste precious time and credits waiting for and using real hardware, only to discover a bug in your code. I’ve now learned to always run on real hardware anyway, because the results are not always going to be the same. In this case, the experiment works noticeably better on real hardware, which is the first time I’ve encountered that.

Anyway, because this is the simplest method, and because it is actually very common, it now has me really, really wondering why no one else has considered my idea before. It seems to be working with practical experimentation on real hardware. Therefore, it stops being a theoretical argument if it actually works.