At long last, physicists from Harvard and MIT have found the killer application for quantum computing: a Mario Bros. GIF made from qubits. The qubits (quantum bits) can also be arranged in a Space Invaders design, or Tetris, or any other shape—your geometrical wish is the qubits’ command.

The GIFs are from QuEra Computing, a Boston startup emerging from stealth, to show off the programmability of their 256-qubit quantum simulator—a special-purpose quantum computer built for solving certain types of problems.

The QuEra machine is the latest leap in scaling up quantum computing to make it more powerful and capable of tackling practical problems. More qubits mean more information can be stored and processed, and researchers developing the technology have been racing to continually raise the bar.

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