Artificial intelligence may soon get a power boost from quantum computing. Researchers have shown that it’s possible to sort and classify complex datasets that algorithms running on classical computers struggle to handle.

“We’ve shown a particular way of moving data into higher dimensions that would be hard for a classical computer but manageable for a quantum computer,” says Antonio Córcoles at IBM in New York.

Classification problems are key to machine learning – for example, given sufficient data AI can learn on its own how to classify …