Microsoft and Google have made breakthroughs in quantum computing, a technology that could revolutionize drug discovery and other fields.

Microsoft has long been working on an alternative that could cut down on the overhead by using components that are far more stable. These components, called Majorana quasiparticles, are not real particles. Instead, they are special patterns of behavior that may arise inside certain physical systems and under certain conditions.

After many years of work, Microsoft has unveiled its first quantum hardware, the Majorana 1 processor. Let’s grok its topoconductor and tetron-based qubits.