Alex Krasnok argues that the value of a university quantum computer lies in what students learn from it

Machine learning Students should understand how quantum computers work as well as how to use them. (Courtesy: IBM Research/CC BY 2.0)"> Machine learning Students should understand how quantum computers work as well as how to use them. (Courtesy: IBM Research/CC BY 2.0)

The best moment in my quantum-computing class often comes when something fails. A student writes a short quantum circuit – a program that tells qubits what operations to perform – then runs it on an ideal simulator and gets the clean answer theory predicts. Yet when the same circuit runs on real quantum hardware, unexpected results appear.

What once looked certain now becomes messy. The student may think the machine has failed but this is, in fact, when the real lesson begins. A run on a quantum processor is a physical experiment that produces a computational result.

Quantum education is expanding rapidly.…