Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Making quantum computers fault-tolerant (and scaling effective error correction to enable this) is a key barrier to a new era of quantum supremacy. The future of quantum computers holds a lot of promise, but as of today, that’s all it is—promise. Raw magic states are imperfect, so engineers combine multiple copies and “distill” the batch into a single, cleaner version. They then distilled five imperfect magic states into one cleaner magic states—refining that “crude oil” into high-octane jet fuel. The results showed that the final magic state contained a higher fidelity than any of the inputs, proving that fault-tolerant magic state distillation is possible.