Fans of Douglas Adams’ sci-fi work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, may be familiar with the Babel fish. The tiny animal can be inserted in the ear and translates any foreign language for its host.

Financial technologists may be on their way to creating their own Babel fish: a circuit that acts as an interpreter between quantum machines and regular computers. Barclays recently used the circuit to develop a quantum version of a neural network. It was able to forecast stock prices more